Today 14th May 2023 is Mothers Day for countries and peoples who recognize this day as a special day to pay tribute/homage to our mothers as the backbone and central pillars of our lives from birth till they or we pass on.
Many lucky children would be sending gifts, flowers and wishes to their living mothers (including grandmothers, mothers-in-law, step-mothers, foster mothers, godmothers etc) but others may have mixed feelings about giving thanks to our mothers on just one day in the year.
Some feel it unnecessary to do so on this day but to thank our mothers everyday of our lives for all the small and big acts of love and compassion they dispense virtually 365 days in a year.
Yet, there are also those who wonder what exactly a mother’s love is? Those orphaned at an early age, are in care, abandoned, neglected or abused. It seems inappropriate to puncture the beautiful ideal of a mother’s role on this “joyous occasion ” but reality comes with memory.
It is hard for some not to have mixed feelings about motherhood or the role their own parents, especially their moms, played in their past lives. Our mothers are only human and very often imperfect, we only realize that when we’re older. Children can’t grasp the challenges of adulthood that cause them to be aware of the under currents of conflict between adults that silently and directly impact them. They can feel rejected or alienated without knowing the reason for it. Adults often play the game of brushing off a child’s misgivings to cover the truth that children, in their innocence, can sense. The child is like a sponge that absorbs certain vibes and does have a sense of justice. A child knows when things are not quite right and if she/he is being treated differently from others.
Yet even those without experience of a true mother’s love may perhaps save their own children from a the suffering they may have gone through in their childhoods. We have a lot to learn, not to wallow in the past and let history repeat itself. We as individual human beings can find ways to change the dark legacies of our pasts and grant our children a future of love, understanding, joy and peace that we perhaps seldom had.
However, we need to teach our innocent children the lessons we learned from our hard pasts to protect and nurture them, not to make the same mistakes our parents or we ourselves may have made. It is a dream, for I do not have children of my own but have a world of children before me. I wonder at the future our children, our hopes and joys, are heading towards. A future we shape…
Winking at Life 