Editorial
Honor Mothers On Their Special Day

This coming Sunday, May 11, is the day when Americans pay homage to the one woman who made them what they are today- their mothers. This Mother's Day is especially significant when we consider that it was 100 years ago almost to the day that Mother's Day was first celebrated anywhere in the United States. In Grafton, West Virginia, Anna Jarvis, a schoolteacher, organized the first Mother's Day on May 10, 1908 to remember her own mother, who had died in 1905. Jarvis went on to lead efforts to establish a national holiday in honor of mothers everywhere. By 1911, almost all states celebrated Mother's Day. In 1914, then President Woodrow Wilson officially declared the second Sunday of May Mother's Day in the United States, and so it is today.

In some quarters, it is fashionable- even de rigueur- to blame one's mother for everything wrong in one's life. Mothers, we are told, destroy their children's psyches by disciplining them too much or too little, using the wrong methods during various stages of upbringing, being too smothering or too indifferent. They try too hard or not enough. They care too much or too little. They never let go or fail to emotionally bond with a child from the very beginning. To listen to some people, it is nothing short of miraculous that anyone reaches adulthood with even a modicum of sanity intact.

We find it ironic that sometimes the people who take the most shots at motherhood are only peripherally acquainted with not only motherhood, but parenthood altogether. When one considers the awesome responsibility attendant upon someone who undertakes to endure childbirth and then to endure the 24/7 efforts required to raise a caring, considerate human being from birth to adulthood, we sometimes give wondering thanks that the species has lasted as long as it has.

Some studies show that the average housewife and mother engages in work that would be worth a considerable amount a year in an average job market if it were done outside the home. Because these tasks are carried out for no currency but the satisfaction of watching a child grow up, they are considered in some circles as of no value. There are few avenues of human thought that are more in error. Our mothers, or the women who served in their stead, are the people who first undertook the serious responsibility of making us into the people we are today. They gave us the moral structure that enabled us to become civilized human beings. They nurtured us and fostered our talents and abilities so that we could become the best possible persons we have it in ourselves to be. Loving us, they enabled us to become loving. Their strengths underlie our courage. Whatever we are we owe to them. It is only fitting that on this one day we honor them openly, even as we honor them in our hearts on every other day.