Finding Meaning in Mother’s Day

Motherhood comes with very high expectations for womanhood: nurturing, selflessness, wisdom, tirelessness, great cook, good housekeeper, attentive indulgent wife, model citizen, and the patience of a saint. Very few of us, and I would venture to say none of us had mothers who exemplified these qualities, all of the time, or even most of the time. Mothers are not ethereal creatures, they are, like all human beings, flawed, growing, learning as individuals, even as they are raising children, and they are not all cut from the same cloth.

The truth is many mothers lose their patience, or never had much to begin with, are not good housekeepers or cooks, not model citizens, and maybe even share a husband with a few other mothers, whether by choice or not. Our mothers may have abandoned us, neglected us, or even abused us. So, why do we celebrate and praise mothers in such glowing terms of perfection on Mother’s Day? We celebrate mothers as symbols of what we value and hold most dear in family life. We will dig through the mud, and find a diamond in the memory of our mothers, and polish it to perfection. If we have the capacity we will nurture the good qualities we valued or ascribed to her in ourselves, and become competent in caring for ourselves and others.

A mother doesn’t have to be the woman who gave birth to you, or a woman at all. It can be the person who nurtures you, teaches you, cares for you, loves you, and protects you, if you are fortunate to have such a person in your life as a child. A mother may be many people in your life. True motherhood surpasses pure biology, though the act of giving birth is a visceral rite of passage that not every mother experiences.

If we grow up free of challenges we are often unprepared to deal with the real world and conflicts in our relationships. Overcoming the challenges we faced as children helps us to polish our own rough edges, if we survive our childhoods. As much as we may have suffered, if we are able to forgive, we are able to view our imperfect mothers with compassion, and take away the best they had to offer us. If we are lucky we know that as imperfect as our mothers may have been, they loved us with all of their hearts, or as much as they were able to love. The magic of love is that it can grow exponentially if we continue to feed it, and this most of us do naturally with the memory of our mothers.