Editorial
Honor Mothers On Their Special Day And Always

It's plain from the volume of mail and the record-setting number of restaurant reservations and flower orders that Americans rank Mother's Day as among the most significant holidays of the year. This is entirely appropriate, considering that mothers are the virtual source of life.

All of us got here the same way, and so it has been since time immemorial. It is to our mothers that we owe our very being. More than that, mothers are our first nurturers, our first source of food, our first teachers. We literally owe all we are to the woman to whom we uttered our first words, under whose watchful eye we took our first steps, who taught us how to hold a spoon, say "please" and "thank you"- who set us upon the way to becoming complete members of the human family.

To truly be a mother is to enter into a lifetime commitment to another human being. Husband and wife are made one by the sacrament of marriage, but just as wives are not the feminine counterparts of husbands, motherhood is not the feminine counterpart of fatherhood. The bond between mother and child transcends the physical. A mother is bound to a child by an emotional commitment that cannot be adequately measured. That bond sustains a child throughout life. Memories of what a mother said and did, however deeply buried and repressed they sometimes may be, many times serve as the pattern and guide, especially when we recall them least but need them most.

Motherhood is all the more remarkable when we consider that a woman does not have to give birth to a child in order to be a mother. Again, throughout many millennia, women have nurtured and raised children who did not issue from their own bodies. The human organism is limitless in its capacity for adapting to circumstances, and many women have cared for- even nursedchildren who were not biologically their own. And just as much as any child physically born to a mother, those children recall the mother figure in their lives, whoever she may have been, remember her teaching, her loving and caring, and honor her throughout their lives.

Mother's Day was first celebrated almost a century ago on May 10, 1908 in Grafton, West Virginia, at the behest of a schoolteacher named Anna Jarvis, who conceived the idea to honor the memory of her own mother, who had died three years before. Anna Jarvis never had children of her own, but Mother's Day lives on as her legacy to mothers everywhere. This Sunday, May 13, let us at the very least pause to honor our mothers. Whether the bond of motherhood is biological or psychological, our mothers are the first and foremost person in all our lives.