An Ounce of Mother Is Worth a Pound of Clergy

I've offered these thoughts before and am doing so again today because I'm a devout believer in recycling. And because they are even more true now (truer?) than when I first wrote them with the birth of my brother and his wife's first grandchild just days ago. Truths, self-evident and otherwise, become truisms when enough of us have them as shared experiences.

I stole the title from a remembered proverb and with it being both Mothers Day and a Sunday I couldn't resist. After all, I am my mother's son, as well as the husband of my son's mother (and of my daughter's mother as well, but I was on a roll and wanted to balance the sentence).

I've read "The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new." And the image that came with that quote is a beautiful bonus, like one of those 'it came with the frame' pictures we all have in our homes.

Families look to a mother the way the fingers on the hand look to the thumb (said the middle finger of our family, me) so I hope wherever you are today you can reconnect with your family, however you see them, and celebrate both mothers and Mothers Day. I have one, my Mom, in Florida,  (she's very peripatetic and the the last time I looked that's where she was) and one, my wife's Mom, in Offenbach, Germany.

Each of their husbands passed away years ago after being married to them for a very long time leaving them alone, but never lonely, and even from the long distances we are from them, I can feel their attention, their concern and their love in every waking moment. 

I see in their eyes what I see in my wife's eyes when she speaks of our children and I know that all mothers' hearts are the same, not just on this day but on all days. Happy Mothers Day.
-bill kenny