It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday.
That’s both casual observation and an urgent warning to everyone out there who just read that and went “oh crap, I’ve got to grab some flowers.”
In the plague times, it’s totally fair to feel the days blurring together into a vague continuum, but if there’s one day we really, really must not overlook, it’s Mother’s Day.
The act of childbirth alone deserves a nod of respect. I mean for crying out loud, this one mother in Mali just released nine new offspring into the world from between her thighs (is her uterus a portal to a 4th dimension? Scientists say probably).
But it’s not just the nine months of hormonal wackiness and body horror, or the delightful sensation of passing a bowling ball (for men: think chainsaw vasectomy), that merits recognition.
After all, that would overlook the people who are mothers of many moulds: adoptive, married-into, mothers of invention, Mother Mother, Mother 2 (Earthbound in the US), the many mothers of Mad Max, the mother of God one invokes when they see dat ass.
All these mothers, and many more besides, deserve our recognition and respect, ESPECIALLY right now.
I don’t know about you, but I have definitely regressed over the past year. Between the Zoom meetings fostering a severe case of anti-pants mentality in our culture, and the increasing need for human contact boiling over to where I just want someone, anyone, to read me a story and make the bad things go away, mothers are vitally important.
Mothers are who we go to for comfort, and in a world severely lacking in such, they must be more overworked and underpaid than an Amazon warehouse worker in a Dickens novel.
Indeed, when we think about these people who feed us, clothe us, shelter us, kiss the owies and hum the lullabies, it’s pretty poor recompense that all we can offer is one day per year to toss them a gift card to Bed, Bath and Beyond.
Maybe we can do more than the minimum, eh?
I don’t know what that necessarily looks like. Your mileage may vary depending on your mom’s needs. Maybe you make an annual commitment to chores. Maybe you pledge to kill all her enemies.
Okay, that might sound extreme, but consider this: for over a year now, we’ve been inundated with news about “unprecedented” events. Why can’t we offer unprecedented generosity and compassion?
The work that mothers put in, this year and all years, has always BEEN unprecedented. So maybe it’s time we established a new precedent for recognizing them.
It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday.
