Week 14 Story: The Live Mother

Once there was a very happy couple that lived in a small village.  After a few years, they bore a child.  Shortly after the child was born, the mother got sick and died.  The father was quite and distraught and did not know how he as going to take care of the baby or feed it.  He decided to hire an old woman to care for the baby. 

Nothing the old woman did could calm the baby down.  It cried all day and night and refused to eat.  However, one night the baby stopped crying as if it was being fed.  The old woman thought this was very strange so she stayed up one night to see what it was that was happening.  That night she saw someone come into the house after midnight and go up to the baby's room where the baby would immediately stop crying. 

The next day, the old woman told the baby's father about this and he decided to gather other people in the village to stay up one night to try and figure out who it was sneaking into their house every night.  That night when the mysterious figure went into the baby's room, the villagers shined a light in it's face.  They gasped in terror as they saw that it was the dead mother. 

What happened next was quite magical.  After the mother saw that she had been seen, she looked down at her baby, and life suddenly consumed her and she became living once again.  The mother, father, and baby lived happily until the baby was grown. 

Happy Mother and Baby.  Web Source. 

Author's Note: My inspiration for this story comes from the Russian Folktales Unit.  The story was called The Dead Mother.  I kept the majority of the story the same except for the ending.  In the original, when the mother saw that she had been seen, she looked down at the baby and then disappeared.  They then saw that the baby had died.  I thought this was a very dark ending so I wanted to make it happier by having the mother coming back to life and living happily with her husband and baby. 

Bibliography: Russian Folk Tales by W.R.S. Ralston.