And Happy Mother's Day

Mother's Day. At first I thought it would be nice to write something about Mothers, since this issue fall on Mother's Day. Unfortunately, as I put pen to paper – or, more correctly, fingers to keyboard – I came up empty.

Hallmark has filled the card racks across the country with Mother's Day cards. Restaurants offer Mother's Day specials. My inbox contains offers for Mother's Day flowers and Mother's Day teddy bears. But all that seems a bit superficial.

How do you express the importance, the influence, the sacrifice of Motherhood?

I thought maybe I could find some stories about the mothers of great men. While my research was nowhere near thorough, I'm not convinced I would have turned up much more if it had been. I found that Einstein's mother forced him to take violin lessons, and worried about the shape of his head. There was one prominent fact about Churchill's mother that turned up – she had a tattoo. After those two I gave up. It seems that mothers don't always get the spotlight.

Or maybe it's that good mothers don't get the spotlight. We hear stories of the teen mothers that leave their baby to die while they go back to the prom. We hear about the drug addicted mothers whose children go from foster home to foster home because their mother is too interested in drugs to be interested in them. And the spotlight shines brightly on the Andrea Yates' of this world.

Allow me a brief comparison. On one hand you have Andrea Yates drowning her children because she didn't feel she was a 'good enough' mother. On the other, the woman who decides to end the life of her unborn child because that child would be born with a disability, and that disability didn't match her family's 'needs and limitations'. You tell me – what's the difference?

Is there that much of a difference between the teen mother leaving her child to die a few short minutes after birth, and the one that allows a doctor to kill her child a few short months before birth? I don't see that sharp of a line between the drug addict whose children move from foster family to foster family, and the career focused mother whose children move from daycare, to tutor, to nanny.

In this modern day, is motherhood an endangered concept? I'm not sure it's any more endangered than it was a few thousand years ago. Back then one mother left her husband for his brother, then encouraged her daughter to dance seductively for her new found love – her daughter's own uncle – for the sole purpose of requesting the beheading of a man who Jesus Himself called the greatest born of woman. No, I don't think motherhood is any more endangered today than at any other time.

Why bring up these bad examples of motherhood then? To contrast them with the great examples of motherhood we see every day, but we just might not recognize. From what I can tell, being a great mother isn't about one or two great 'acts' that are noticed by many. It's about love, sacrifice, and care being shown every day. Shown in such a way that we take it for granted, that we tend not to notice it.

How do you express what a good mother is? I'm not sure I can, but I do see what a dark void is left when that true motherhood is missing.

So to every mother whose sacrifice and love isn't splashed across the front page, and to every woman and young lady who aspires to be that kind of mother, Happy Mother's Day. We know the cards, the flowers, or the dinners don't really do it justice. But we know you'll smile and say you loved it – no matter what it is we that we get you – because, well, just because you're a mother. And somehow you understand.