Mother’s Day in a pandemic

You gals got it made. You get all that attention when you show a baby bum and baby showers and maternity leave.

Sure you had to go through all that menstruation thing and those growing pectorals but you could wear long hair while the rest of us had to have those buzz cuts. No one told us about those pads and tubes with strings, so we made fun of sweaters wrapped around the waist without a clue.

You got calendars and magazines flaunting so us guys could drool and get all excited.  

Losing your virginity was a rite of age passage, but what was to follow might be planned or a surprise.

Sixty years ago pharmaceutical magic presented an oral solution to keeping the passion without the results.

Still you had pressure to produce like a chicken in an egg farm. Society needed procreation for continuance of the species. Motherhood was touted without reference to responsibility that came with the title.

The parents and the church promoted abstinence until marriage. Then the pressure was on to produce a flock to be paraded to the family as some prided accomplishment that generations had done before.

The father would hand out cigars as prizes of his brief squirt as if he had done something no other could do.

Whether the offspring was a son or a daughter, the responsibility for maintaining the life form was to the mother. She was the first to deliver food to the new life.

From then on, childcare was decided and a formulation of destiny was by the mother. If a single mother or in a ‘family’ situation, when the little one fell and got a boo-boo the call went out for “Mommy!”

To some the burden was too much and the wayward puppy was put up for adoption. Some were shifted back and forth. Some were just lost.

I was a mommy’s boy. I grew up in a fundamental conservative family structure but when I had a problem or asked for help, it was mom who listened. I learned to read her like a book and get away with all sorts of stuff.

Today is a salute to the women who went through this job called ‘motherhood’. No one paid you for this. It was beyond the one-day celebrations with flowers and candy. You had to deal with carrying us around for months like weighted hopsacks and were responsible for feeding and clothing and schooling and transportation and doctoring and general caring for us. It took a lot of time.

If we had grown up juvenile delinquents or worse, the mother would be blamed.

If we grew up to be a lawyer or doctor raising a family in a picket fenced house in a good neighborhood with two little grandchildren then the one called ‘mother’ had done a good job.

To all the Mothers out there (and the Fathers because it takes two to tango) hope you well. See what you produced and have pity on us all.

Hope it was worth the effort.