On Mother’s Day – May 2003

During my ninth or tenth grade year at Westtown School, I was playing in a low level soccer game against Church Farm School.  An opposing player fouled me somehow (memory escapes) and I called him a son-of-a-bitch.  His reaction was to come after me shouting something about not making comments about his mother.  I was surprised then, and remain surprised today, at the vehemence of his response and at its mistaken focus.  I, of course, was referring to him.  He took my epithet as a direct insult, not just of his lineage, but of his mother specifically.  Where does this reverence for motherhood come from?  Why do we celebrate motherhood in May of each year?

The worship of mothers in America is balanced by the repression of our mixed emotions about mothers in general and our own mothers in particular.  Freud tells us we entertain forbidden sexual fantasies about our mothers, calling them Oedipal after Sophocles' character who murders his father and later marries and fathers children with his mother.  American men can’t or won’t even entertain a suggestion that this attraction might reflect some reality in our psyches.  Perhaps our obsession with women's breasts suggests our denial is all too hollow.  The most peaceful and satisfying moments of our early lives lie close to our mothers’ breasts.  We never cease trying to return to this state.  We also suffer nearly unbearable separations from Mom.  First we are ripped from her womb, leaving the floating comfort of the uterus for the cold and bright world of the delivery room, and then we must leave home, first for school and finally for good.  She loves us and nurtures us and disciplines us and corrects us. No wonder our feelings about our mothers are confused.

I have been reading, over the years, with interest and no little dismay of the Marian movement within the Catholic Church.  My meager understanding of Christianity includes descriptions of Jesus’ virgin birth, but does not enshrine his mother into the trinity, creating a quadrinity.  And yet, within Catholicism, the veneration of Mary, The Mother of God, exceeds that accorded run-of-the-mill saints and becomes true worship. The Cult of the Virgin.  The veneration of Virginity.  Marry as a virgin.  Marry a virgin.  Be pure, like Mary.  Mother is pure, distant, cool and loving – like Mary.  While not a Catholic myself, I am interested in Church history, love the music, art, and architecture the Church has inspired, and once went to a Papal Audience to see Pope John XXIII carried down the length of St. Peter’s in a sedan chair to the cheers of ecstatic nuns and excited lay people. In short, I’m not an anti-Catholic bigot, but I find myself troubled by the role of Mary within the Church.

More troubling, it seems to me, is the convergence between the Virgin and the role of mothers in contemporary American society.  I had been assured by those who care for me, that I was just imagining things in putting together these two seemingly divergent strands of thought.  An Internet search quickly disabused me of this concern.  Curricula for parish Sunday schools describe how to connect Mother’s Day celebrations to Mary worship in detail.  The line between thanking our mothers for the important and difficult job they have and worshipping them in a less than healthy fashion is easy to cross.  In our culture it has been crossed.  The greeting card and floral display industries are willingly complicit in this effort.  The second Sunday in May (Why is it that Mother’s Day is celebrated on a Sunday?) is set aside to thank our mothers.  It has too easily become confused with worshipping them rather than thanking them.

Many years ago, in the first year of our marriage, I rolled over one bright and sunny Sunday morning in May and murmered to my almost new wife, “I think I’ll have pancakes for breakfast.”  She broke into tears.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, truly mystified.

“It’s Mother’s Day,” she wailed.

I, always the sensitive one, responded, “You’re not my mother,” and the sobbing increased.

After all these years this brief rupture has become, almost, a joke between us.  The other day, as we were driving, Irene commented that she hoped our sons remembered to be sure their children recognized Mother’s Day, after all, their spouses are “not their mother’s” but it would be a good idea to get the kids going in seeing that Mom had her day.  Which, finally, brings us back to a central question.  How do we appropriately recognize the hard work and sacrifice our mothers make without turning the day into a lacrimose, maudlin celebration of the idealized mother none of us ever had?