Mothering

You have shopping to do.  More on that in a minute.

For those of us raised in Donna Reed households, we know the drill.  Mom gets a big corsage, Dad takes us out for brunch, where we try to figure out what that yellow goo is on the eggs, and we eat dinner out of Chinese takeout cartons, which Mom ends up taking care of Monday morning.  There’s a flowery card involved, too, unless her kids are young.  Then, it involves uncooked kidney beans, pasta, finger paint, and purple glitter.

The origins of Mother’s Day clearly point to this as being the goal—and, like too many American ideals, it fell short from the beginning.  Single moms, children with no moms, kids who would just as soon forget their moms, and families who knew brunch was too expensive saw Mother’s Day as one more event to live through, one more scar to avoid opening.  To the moms out there who think smiling at a cordless drill as a Mother’s Day gift is tough, look around.

The good news is that society has moved forward a little.  There’s still a number of corsage-wearing mothers, to be sure, but that’s no longer the default option.  Moms who want to spend the day at the ballpark with a beer in hand feel more like they can.  Kids who never knew Mom send thank you emails to the neighbor who walked them through adolescence, or buy pizza for the older sister who took up the Mom mantle when it was vacated.  Other kids find ways to thank father figures who knew that raising a kid in today’s world required showing their sensitive side, and never mind what the other dads thought.  For some kids, that means thanking both of their dads—maybe even with cards that have uncooked pasta on the covers. Cool.

This suggests we are moving towards a Mother’s Day where we are honoring Moms and mothering, no matter who demonstrates those vital qualities. Not only does this more accurately depict what’s always been the case; it comes at a vital time in our society, when influences try to impersonalize the way we all live, and the way too many kids are raised.  More studies than ever suggest COVID, texting, social media, and busy parents are steering kids in directions that can be socially sterile, a trend that requires both mothering and fathering skills if it’s to be corrected.  Mom and Dad aren’t always there to mother and father, so sometimes we have to pick up the slack.  Thanks to societal changes about who can parent, the chance to make a difference is greater than ever. Mother’s Day is starting to recognize that.

And your chance to mother is right here, right now.  The US Postal Service has held its Stamp Out Hunger food drive for a while, but only recently did it dawn on me that it’s usually the day before Mother’s Day—and that’s the case this year.  Talk about a way to infuse some mothering in your life, and in our society.  You literally get to feed people. 

So fill a grocery bag with 8-10 nonperishable items.  It’s OK to give them food you aren’t using, as long as it’s unexpired and they’ll eat it, but check this list as you go, aiming to include cans with pop-up openers, not ones that require can openers.  Put it by your mailbox Friday night, and watch how 10 cans of food becomes billions of tons of food, all feeding the world in a maternally magnificent way. Donna would be proud.

Mom’s Souvenirs

They used to read you Goodnight Moon
8 times a day
And know it by heart
To this day.
The bottom of their backpack still holds
Two ancient packs of fruit snacks
A dried-out bottle of hand sanitizer
And a used tissue
No one wants to hear about.

They told you
That new girl in class was trouble
But they held you one Friday
When that became clear to you the hard way
Without a shred
Of I-told-you-so.

Midnight runs for poster board
Two dozen bake-less vegan bake sale treats
From scratch
At 6:30 am.
Wearing the same pair of shoes to work
For three years
So you could wear six.
Coffee laced with rain
On frigid November sidelines.
Blurry prom pictures
Because their eyes were, too.

Love is a verb
And a noun.
And now
You know
Mother is too.

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