Editorial: Mothers

You’d think that carrying a baby around for nine months, then enduring the unimaginable agony of child birth would be the last thing a mother should ever have to do for her child. But we know that simply isn’t the case because motherhood is a life-long job.

It starts with that seemingly endless period of feeding, burping and changing diapers loaded with the most horrifying of noxious substances. This is followed by a period of time where anything nice or dangerous has to be well out of baby’s curious reach.

And then the real fun begins – dealing with a child that can speak.

But as we grew as individuals, mom was always there to help us with that growth, guiding us away from danger as if it were a hot iron and kissing our wounds when we were burned.

Whether it was assuaging our fears about going to school that first day, picking up our spirits when we lost a game or driving us to wherever we needed to go, mom was always there and was always that one person we could look to in our lives for stability and safety.

Oh sure, there was that period of about four or five years where she, like dad, was the stupidest person on the planet – the one who just didn’t understand us or what it felt like to be under the crushing yoke of parental rules.

Adults, they were all alike in those days.

But remarkably, as we got older, mom became smarter once again. It wasn’t that she’d magically gained wisdom, gone back to school or had suddenly got in touch with her inner youth. It was that we had come around to understanding what it was like for her to have to install those boundaries for our well-being. Those guidelines and pieces of advice that we didn’t think we needed, back when we thought we knew it all.
But mom knew better. She still does.

She’s still there to share in our successes and comfort us in our failures, to pick us up when we’re down and keep us up when we’ve dusted ourselves off again.

And even if she’s gone, many of us believe that a part of her still watches over us, still guides us. So perhaps motherhood is more than a life-long job.

But while she’s still here – let’s not keep her waiting this Mother’s Day.

Call your mother.

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