Robert Munsch’s Classic Story Of A Mother’s Love Turns 40

What do we celebrate on Mother’s Day but the incredible love of mothers? While God has been revealed as Our Father and not Our Mother, God Himself uses a mother’s love to explain His own. “As one whom his mother comforts,” we read in Isaiah 66’s promises of a new and everlasting covenant that will fulfill all the old promises to Israel, “so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.”

That powerful and persistent love is depicted and celebrated in a somewhat startling and even unsettling way in Robert Munsch’s classic 1986 story, illustrated by Sheila McGraw, titled Love You Forever. Even after forty years, it’s a book that seems to elicit either love or hate. I won’t hide that I’m one of the lovers of the book. Nor am I alone. Munsch’s website, titled “Love You Forever,” claims its namesake has sold 15 million copies.

The story is a very simple one. It is the story of a mother’s relationship to her son from the time he is a baby till the time when she is old and frail and the son has his own baby. At each stage of the boy’s existence, whether he is being sweet or “driving me crazy” (as a toddler or a teen), the mother still sneaks into his room at night, picks him up, rocks him, and sings a song:

I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
as long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be. 

The comedic part is that, even when that boy is a grown man, the mother still does what she always did. “But sometimes on dark nights,” the reader sees opposite McGraw’s depiction of a blue car with headlights blazing and a ladder tied to the top, “the mother got into her car and drove across town.” (The detail of the red scarf tied to the back of the ladder always cracks my wife up.)

On the next page, we see the tiny mother cradling “that great big man” on a bed with an open window and the top of the ladder in the background. We know from the text that she rocks him “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth” while singing the song.

The end of the book brings forth waterworks in the eyes of most readers. I suspect that this tearjerking power motivates many of its haters. In the book’s final scenes, we see: the great big man returning the favor, having crossed town to rock and sing to his mother; the man having returned home and stopped at the top of the stairs; and the man holding and singing to his own brand-new baby daughter as he rocks her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

You don’t need to know the story’s origins to feel its power. They are sad and beautiful, however. Munsch, one of nine children, and his wife, Ann, suffered the loss of two stillborn children. Though they later adopted three children, the grief was still strong. The iconic song in the book was one that came to Munsch as he mourned and thought about what he wanted to say to his lost children.    

The four lines both comforted and brought him to tears. As he explained, “It was very strange having a song in my head that I couldn’t sing.” Gradually, the song became bearable to sing out loud. It was while doing a performance onstage in Guelph, Ontario, that he decided to make a story around it. “Out popped Love You Forever,” he explained, “pretty much the way it is in the book.”

Though his own publisher didn’t think it was a children’s book, he found one who did. Thankfully, he found the perfect illustrator. Sheila McGraw’s illustrations, based in part on her two youngest sons who were still living at home, are full of love. As she observed in an interview, her decision to mix “modern furnishings and fashions, which are still quite up-to-date looking with nineteen-fifties era nostalgic items, the old style fridge and kitchen cabinets, furniture and so forth,” do in fact give the story a “timeless” feeling. 

From the beginning, the book was as popular with adults as it was with children. Munsch’s publisher called him early on with the news that retirement communities were places where it was most popular. As Munsch says, “In fact, it turned out that parents buy it for grandparents and grandparents buy it for parents and kids buy it for everybody and everybody buys it for kids.” Given the meditation on the relationship of mothers to sons and fathers to daughters, it’s not surprising.

The copy in our house is ragged and dog-eared. It was inscribed to our oldest son, Gus, on July 28, 2002, by my own mother, who loved to read it to him even if he was only a few months old. A talented singer and piano player, she sang the song to her own tune. Munsch, whose own version can be heard in his recorded reading of the book, would have approved; he encouraged people to send him recordings of their versions.

Mom died not quite a year after she wrote in the book, shortly before we found out our second son was on the way. My wife and I got to take care of her in her last months, so the book—both the physical book and the story—holds a great many memories for me. Some are sad, but that is because of the great love my mother had for me and my brother. She truly comforted us in a way that made real the love of God, who lives forever and always loves.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.