By Henrylito D. Tacio
To mama, with love
Let me start this piece with a story from Richelle E. Goodrich, author of Secrets of a Noble Key Keeper:
“Son, I hope your opinion of your mother hasn’t lessened, knowing what you now know.”
Gavin glanced up; incredulity skewed his eyebrows. His expression appeared both stunned and appalled. “Never, Father! I love her! It makes no difference to me where she came from.”
The man nodded, a show of relief in his features. His large hand, soft in touch, went to brush a string of hair away from his wife’s peaceful profile. “Your mother loves you too, son, more than anything in the world. She worries about you, day and night.”
That sentiment stirred something profoundly pleasant inside the boy. He grinned at the internal warmth it created.”
Ah mother. “Everybody had one with the exception of Adam and Eve,” wrote Liz Smith, the woman behind The Mother Book. “Many of us still have them. We are either blessed or cursed (or a combination of both) and each of you knows into which category your perception of or feelings about mother falls.”
Every year, the world celebrates the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day. It was W.R. Wallace who penned the immortal lines: “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”
At least three famous American presidents owed their success to their mothers. George Washington, the first president, said: “My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.”
Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated while he was still the president, recalled: “I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.”
“There never was a woman like her,” said Andrew Jackson of his mother. “She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness… The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and in that capital I have made my way.”
“Men are what their mothers made them,” quipped Ralph Waldo Emerson. “A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts,” Washington Irving pointed out.
“In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess,” wrote N.K. Jemisin in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. “She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.”
“Every woman is a gift when she becomes a daughter. Every woman is beautiful when she becomes a lover. Every woman is special when she becomes a wife. Every woman is a god when she becomes a Mother,” Vivek Thangaswamy once said.
Some famous men even used their mother’s surname instead of their father’s: William Arden (Shakespeare), Isaac Ayscough (Newton), Thomas Randolph (Jefferson), Napoleon Ramolino (Bonaparte), Ludwig Keverich (van Beethoven), Charles Wedgwood (Darwin), Karl Pressburg (Marx), Thomas Alva Elliot (Edison), Sigmund Nathanson (Freud), Albert Koch (Einstein), Charlie Hill (Chaplin), and Ernest Hall (Hemingway).
Some mothers, even though they are celebrities, believe that breast milk is the best and ideal food for infants. Among those who subscribe to the idea include the following famous mothers: Karen Black, Lesley Brown, Lillian Carter, Elizabeth II, Glenda Jackson, Cloris Leachman, Pia Lindstrom, Sophia Loren, Margaret Mead, Grace Kelly, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbara Rush, Natalie Wood and Joanne Woodward.
There are women who, despite the fact they were already old, decided to become mothers. Svetlana Alliluyeva was 45 when she delivered Olga in 1971. Lucille Ball was 42 when she gave birth to Desi Arnaz, Jr. in 1953. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was 43 when her only son was born in 1849. Two months after her 40th birthday, Rosalynn Carter delivered Amy. Gloria Vanderbilt was 44 when her fourth son was born in 1968.
In Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living, Craig D. Lounsbrough wrote: “Being a mother is not about ‘birthing a child into the world.’ Rather, it is about repeatedly ‘birthing into the child’ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.”
By the way, the modern holiday of Mother’s Day was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Her campaign to make “Mother’s Day” a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died.
Anna Jarvis wanted to honor her mother by continuing the work she started and to set aside a day to honor all mothers, because she believed that they were “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother’s Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.
A good mother… when you cry, she carries you; when you are hungry, she will hurry to feed you; when you are about to sleep, she sings for you! Long live good mothers! Thank you, mama!” wrote Israelmore Ayivor in The Great Hand Book of Quotes.
To end this piece, here’s a story shared by the famous French author Victor Hugo:
It was during the French Revolution in 1700. A mother and her two children were driven from their home. They wandered through the woods and fields for several days, living on roots and leaves. On the third morning, they hid in some bushes but two soldiers flushed them out. The officer saw they were starving, so he gave them a long loaf of French bread.
The mother grabbed like a famished animal, broke it into two pieces, and gave one to each child. One officer saw that and asked the other, “Isn’t that mother hungry?”
“No,” replied the captain, “it’s because she’s a mother.”
