Son's Thoughts on Mother's Day

If you've seen the little known, but hilarious movie "Popeye" starring Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall, you may have missed a line Popeye mutters in reference to the fact he has a little kid, Sweetpea. "I'm a mudder meself," he says, proudly. Being a mother is so highly prized even a rough, tough old salt of a vegetarian like Popeye vied to be one. Mother's Day was invented as a way to tell the women that bore us just how prized they are.

Some women cannot quite grasp what all the festivities are about, unless they are mothers themselves, in which case they may feel only half the story if they had a troubled relationship with their own mother. I once knew a woman whose mother had little good to say to her, was abusive of her and at one point left her in the care of others before reclaiming her some time later to live with a jerk of a stepfather. To women like her, Mother's Day may come with painful feelings; reminders of what could have been but wasn't. To such women, the Day couldn't be over fast enough.

I think the Universe honors these women sometimes by making of them mothers themselves, and so becoming the object of a child's love and affection. What she didn't get from her own mother, she can get some recompense with children of her own, becoming to them what she never had herself. Though this doesn't fill up the hole left in her soul by her non-bonding mother, she has love that surrounds her in relation to the whole role of motherhood. In spite of this, these women may find it very difficult to accept their role as mother, unconsciously associating that role with the piss-poor job her own mother did with her, and thinking secretly that she, too, is a piss-poor mother. That she is loved and cherished for exactly who she is is difficult for her to fathom.

My own mother, Barbara, was actually close to sainthood, although she wasn't Roman Catholic, in which case no one could get away with nominating her for the post. She martyred herself at the altar of my father and the eight children she bore him. She was in the league of women who wiped countless noses and bottoms, cleaned up multiple sickness, washed the bedsheets of five teenage boys in puberty, cooked thousands of meals, scrubbed floors, washed windows, planted flowers, bought groceries, wrote letters, read stories, came to school band concerts and plays, and took pictures of us she later captioned with the name of each kid in case she forgot who they were.

She also secretly smoked cigarettes, her one vice and stress-buster, which eventually killed her. Here we are shortly before she died. I miss her and honor her memory today...