Mother's Day

Congratulations! If you are alive and reading this, you have a mother. Once a year we celebrate those who have gone through misery for nine months only to give birth and realize the real misery lies ahead. Don’t get me wrong. I believe children are God’s greatest gift but they can be a true test of our love for them. I raised my son by myself in Coeur d’Alene and Los Angeles and those were the best years of my life. Now at the age of 68 I look at young parents and marvel at their patience. Mothers not only raise children but many of them balance a successful career at the same time. How do they do that?

Women are the bravest souls on the planet. In the 1970s I worked as an ambulance driver in Los Angeles and witnessed three births and I can tell you if men had to go through the agony of labor we would have gone extinct a long time ago. After the first contraction I would have told my spouse, “Don’t you ever touch me again!” Yet women have the courage to not only give birth once but to continue giving birth even though you’d think they would have a memory of all that pain. Who does that? Mothers do that.

Whenever I talk with a young mother who is frustrated with her husband I always remind them that men are basically Neanderthals with a driver’s license. Women are superior to men in every category, with the occasional exception of upper body strength. Mothers are saints in Italian shoes. They say that in battle, soldiers who are wounded and facing imminent death cry for their mothers. Never a cry for morphine or another day of life but scream to see their mother one last time. Such is the power of motherhood.

The modern holiday of Mother’s Day was first celebrated in 1908 when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, W.Va. That same year the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to officially celebrate Mother’s Day but two years later every state was celebrating that special day of the year. I’m guessing that after two years of politicians going home and facing their own mothers was enough for them to realize just who gave them life in the first place. How often do we all sometimes forget that? In 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother’s Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers and we’ve been buying flowers ever since. It’s the least we can do for the woman who gave us life and then put up with us ever since. Happy Mother’s Day to all the true heroes in this world…our mothers.