Colonial Mothers’ Day

I have known a few mothers in my day, and I venture to say that it wasn’t an easy vocation for any of them. I could reel off a litany of the burdens that mothers bear, but it would lean too comfortably on the obvious; even more onerous than labour and childbirth and dirty diapers and midnight feedings and so on, though, must be the obligations so ingrained into the ways that cultures work, that we who inhabit those cultures can’t even see them. Indeed, there must be trials in motherhood that even mothers themselves can’t articulate, invisible splinters of duty jabbing mercilessly into the pace of daily expectation, foreclosed possibilities leering mockingly at aspiration.
 
I can’t say enough for mothers — for my mother (Hi, Mom!), Margaret’s mother, for my dearly beloved Margaret herself, prospectively perhaps for some of the other women to whom I’m related — but I can and must say: For what I do not understand, for what I’ve taken for granted, for what I’ve appreciated cursorily, for precisely the graces you have offered me and all of us, one day a year is but a window into the lifetime of thanks I offer to Margaret, Nancy, Pat, and all of you. Bless you, thank you, I’m sorry, and bless you and thank you all over again for not clobbering me over the head with the scale of your commitment and determination, and the 364-day years that go by without anyone saying, “How lovely, that you give so much to being a mother!”