Moms and Mums

   Apologies to all mothers for not mentioning the recent holiday that celebrated you; it's not that I had forgotten for here in the U.S., that day of celebration has become a marketing bonanza, a frenzy usually not seen again until the arrival of Christmas.  Stores are jammed, shelves are lined with more flowers than at Valentine's Day, and there's everything from boxes of candy to stuffed toy bears pinned with tiny heart-shaped notes decrying one's love for the "best" mom or the "greatest" mom...or wife, or grandmother, or mother-in-law or whoever else the marketers feel that you could think of that might be remotely thought of as an additional mother.   At one particular store, I asked the greeting card rep what exactly happened to all of those hundreds or thousands of cards when the official Mother's Day holiday was over (she had boxes and boxes of cards on the floor and couldn't keep up with keeping the slots full, the people grabbing cards as if they were war rations); "we toss them," she told me, "toss or shred them."  You can't send them back, or re-use them next year, or donate them to a homeless shelter or retirement facility, I asked?  "The manufacturers tell us no, that it's too expensive to ship them back so to just throw them all out."  She went on to tell me that a few years ago, some vendors were indeed keeping the excess cards and selling them online the next year (heads up, those of you spotting bargain cards on such sites)...so there went that (albeit illegal) effort at recycling.  So in this one store alone, perhaps several thousand cards would hit the dumpster later in the day as would the shopping carts full of discounted candies and teddy bears (same story on re-use).  Of course, this is in the U.S., one of the few countries to make Mother's Day a specific holiday in the latter part of May.  Add to all this the flurry of guilt-inducing commercials on the tellie and in print and one is unfortunately left a bit jaded.  Mother's Day has become what is now commonly termed, a Hallmark Holiday, a moniker after the large greeting card company which is meant to signify any holiday that starts out with good intentions but soon becomes seen (perhaps unconsciously) a commercial sales boon (the creation of Santa Claus is one good example, as is the Easter Bunny).

    In other countries, the dedicated day to celebrate and recognize one's mother spans from February in Norway to August in Thailand, and on into November in Russia and late December in Indonesia.  Here in the U.S. a woman named Anna Jarvis fought to have an official holiday created to celebrate mothers (her efforts were initially rejected by Congress) but when that eventually happened in 1908, she grew disgusted by the commercialization of the idea some ten years later and fought to try and restore the original goal of the holiday...unsuccessfully.  Said Wikipedia: Jarvis believed that the companies had misinterpreted and exploited the idea of Mother's Day, and that the emphasis of the holiday was on sentiment, not profit.  As a result, she organized boycotts of Mother's Day, and threatened to issue lawsuits against the companies involved.  Jarvis argued that people should appreciate and honor their mothers through handwritten letters expressing their love and gratitude, instead of buying gifts and pre-made cards...She specifically noted that "Mother's" should "be a singular possessive, for each family to honor its own mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world."   In the facility where my mother resides, sweets are a regular (and somewhat regulated) feature of the menu, so while candy is always welcome, the rising diabetes and fat levels may not be; and when I once gave her one of those plush teddy bears as a decoration (not for Mother's Day but just a random gift to place on her shelf), she pushed it away with a rebuke..."we're not babies," she told me, "that's a baby thing."  Ahem...so much for those Mother's Day candies and teddy bears.

    The subject of mothers in general can be quite complicated, the original celebration of such often delving back into religious origins, Mother Mary in many Christian faiths and Mata Tirtha Aunshi in some of the Hindu beliefs.  The reality for any of us, lest we forget, is that without our mothers we would not exist...period.  Sometimes I look at my rather tiny mother (in stature) and wonder how such cellular growth could have created me and grown me to where I physically am now.  Each spring, I marvel at the same blossoming of life as I watch the leaves of trees emerge from what appeared to be almost-dead branches and becoming a brilliant cluster of greenery.  But as with all life, there is much more too it that that.  Mothers can be frustrating and demanding and overbearing, as well as loving and gracious and all-giving.  Mothers can almost love you too much, as well as leave you abandoned or feeling that way as echoed in John Lennon's lament: Mother, you had me
But I never had you; I wanted you, But you didn't want me; So I, I just got to tell you...Goodbye, Goodbye.   Teen mothers, mothers on drugs, surrogate mothers, working mothers, single mothers.  Who can say what a mother feels, that maternal tug that men and non-mothers will likely never come close to understanding, no matter the outside appearance.  And sometimes for the child, this reflection comes rather late in life, a broken ship that wasn't supposed to make it back from the storm finally pulling into the harbor and in need of repair.  The audio story by Samuel Lewis Lee on The Moth Radio Hour is especially touching on this (and well worth listening to).

    My wife and I attended an educational meeting meant to explain and discuss the many facets of dementia (affecting my mother) and help to explain why both my wife and I were feeling puzzled at our frustration and impatience with our mothers only to discover that even for the director, frustration broke out at his own dementia-ridden sister now living with him (his mother and father had both passed on); "I know better," he said, "I've worked in this industry for 33 years...but sometimes you just have to walk away and accept it."  Ironically, I'd just finished a book by Winnifred M. Reilly titled It Takes One to Tango.  What captured my attention was that she was a marriage and family therapist who recognized that her own marriage was in trouble, laying credence to the premise that sometimes even professionals sometimes can't see the problems right in front of them.  But beyond her own story, she jumped into that term one hears of the formative childhood years, the upbringing and attitudes that your parents bring to you and which you (again, perhaps unconsciously) carry into your future relationships.  Here's just one excerpt: When under pressure from our partners to be or do what they want, maintaining that clarity becomes all the more challenging.  It can seem that the problem is that our partner is pressuring us --if she would only back off; if he'd just stop making demands-- but the real issue is our poorly developed sense of self.  And that problem is one that only we can fix...As children we all experienced pressure similar to the pressure we get from our partner: pressure to conform, to please, not to disappoint.  In one way or another and to varying degrees, we were pressed by our parents and teachers, our families and our peers, to be more how they wanted us to be and less how we actually are.  Maybe not totally different, but definitely "improved."  You, minus your wandering mind or your interest in dance or your dream of becoming an astronaut.  You with the added bonus of being an extrovert...Whether we're too much of this or not enough of that --too bossy, too shy, not generous to others-- we got a clear message that "being ourselves" might not be the best way to go.  

    Not quite clear on her concept?  She talks of one couple that she counseled: ...about her long-standing avoidance of conflict, how as a child she'd played the role of the peacemaker and how she'd carried that into her marriage -- with Edward (the husband) more than happy for her to play that role with him.  She would have to challenge her questionable notion that she was needed or even essential to Edward's emotional regulation, that without her he would feel frighteningly out of control...she would find that she'd agreed to enact this humiliating exercise in exchange for security, for Edward's loyalty and love, ignoring the price that she paid in self-esteem, ignoring how, over time, it would cause her to distance herself from Edward in ways that would be destructive to both of them and their marriage...On the husband's side, he told the therapist: Before I had children, I gave a good deal of thought to what kind of father I wanted to be.  I looked at my own father, and I knew I wanted to be different from him.  I wanted to be more involved and more available to my kids.  And I believe I've ended up being the kind of father I set out to be.  But as for myself as a husband?  To be quite honest, I didn't give much thought to what kind if husband I wanted to be.  And I can't say I've done nearly as good a job as a husband as I did as a father.

    If you haven't watched the movie Hidden Figures yet, do so soon.  The racism depicted still exists and is vividly documented in both the book and the movie (and remember, this was still only the early 1960s)...didn't matter if their minds were instrumental in getting men to the moon --or if they were mothers juggling life at home-- for this had happened before when Rosalind Franklin took an X-ray image (Photo 51) which showed the structure of DNA, a photo shown to James Watson by Maurice Wilkins without Franklin's approval (Watson/Wilkins/Crick went on to win the Nobel Prize for the DNA structure and no credit was ever cited to Franklin).  In a review of it and similar books, The New York Review of Books wrote: When light is passed through a prism, it is dispersed into a faint strip of rainbow colors, from red to orange to yellow and on to violet.  A person looking through a spectroscope will see not only the rainbow strip but also black lines of varying thickness that reveal the individual elements of which the light is composed.  Owing to advances in photography, images of the lines created by starlight and passed through a spectroscope could be recorded directly onto glass plates.  By measuring the thickness of the lines and their placement along the spectrum of visible light, the Harvard Observatory workers were able to discern the chemical composition of stars.  This brought about a revolution in astronomy...

    So step back a bit from this blame game of how we all turned out for better or worse.  Life is life and it all comes with growing pains.  Every parent is different, as every child is different.  As grandparents like to tell you, there is no instruction manual.  But for mothers in general, having a baby or babies is tough from day one.  That bond of giving her own milk and antibodies is a mother's first gift of herself, and from there the duties only become more in number.  The juggling of work and school, doctors and husbands (if there is one still in the house)...then throw in society perhaps looking down at you. Perhaps just as with a prism, there is far more to see, far more to graph and put down on paper...but it might take a different mind, brilliant or not, to see the many spectrums.  Mothers worldwide might already have that ability...and whether the rest of us will ever recognize that, we can at least give thanks, and wish all mothers their special day.  Who knows, their insight might just bring about another revolution...