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Some Motherly Advice: Call Home

My children are grownups, scattered over the United States. So there’s no ingathering on Mother’s Day. My husband can’t give me the special Sunday gift of not having to cook because I never cook. He does. (Mental note: cook for him on Father’s Day if he’s willing to take the risk.) Besides, M-D feels like a Hallmark holiday, carrying an obligation of cards, flowers, phone calls and gifts.

My family is a loving bunch, with no need of a special day to prove it to me. I try never to guilt them into acts that they wouldn’t normally perform. So why will I jump every time the phone rings, hoping that one or more of my kids is on the line? And why will I keep count?

I do keep count. I can’t help myself. Of my longtime family—five children and stepchildren—at least four check in every year. Some years, one of them might be abroad (who remembers Mother’s Day in Austria?) or one might zone out. I gather their calls like flowers, dropping them into a mental crystal vase.

The idea of naming a special day to honor mothers arose in a pre-suffrage time. The cause gave women a moment to escape from what was then their domestic obscurity and join a public solidarity march. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first national Mother’s Day in 1914. Cards-and-flowers followed fast. After just nine years, the day’s principal founder turned against it, deploring the commercialization seemed to take away its deeper meaning.

But Hallmark or not, I feel the tug. Mothers everywhere are getting the annual nod and I don’t want to be left out. Truth be told, there’s also that little guilting thought—“I’m your mother, I fed and clothed and burped you, I did my best, and I want you to say so!”  It’s self-referential and unworthy of a noble spirit. Never mind all that. I’m sitting here, waiting for your calls.

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