EXCERPTS:
A few years back on Mother’s Day, I got out of bed before sunrise and
joined a pack of roving carolers. Together we stalked house to house,
belting out a song in mangled Spanish.
I was in Guatemala, where mother worship runs so deep, El Dia de la Madre
is a national holiday. Schools and businesses shut down so everyone can
devote a full 24 hours to the materfamilias. The most committed sons
and daughters rise before dawn to set off firecrackers and serenade the
neighbourhood’s mothers with a traditional song.
Here in Canada, we mark Mother’s Day
with less fervor but perhaps an even greater sense of duty, bowing to
social pressure to buy flowers or a card or put in a call to mom. (The
second Sunday in May always rivals Christmas as the day when the highest
volume of long-distance calls are placed in Canada.)
We recognize motherhood is sacred,
and always has been. The Egyptians had their annual festival honouring
Isis, the mother of the pharaohs. The Greeks and Romans inherited the
cult of the mother goddess Cybele from the Anatolians, and the Hindus
still have Durga Puja, which celebrates the divine embodiment of
creative femininity.
Mothers are godlike, with their mysterious power to form embryos and deliver human beings to life.
Yet many signs point to a failure of
respect for mothers in Canada. We have the lowest child care access
rates in the industrialized world, according to the Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives. Canadian mothers pay more for child care, and the
quality of the service they get is undermined by low wages for early
childhood educators. These trends affect fathers and mothers alike, but
mothers more.
At the time of the last census,
single mothers bore a disproportionate amount of the country’s poverty,
with 32.2 per cent falling below the low-income cut-off. It is these
same mothers who are bearing the worst consequences of the recession,
struggling to heat their homes and feed their children.
And as reporter Elizabeth Payne pointed out in an opinion piece in the Edmonton Journal this
week, massive cuts to foreign aid in the current federal budget
threaten our previous commitments to global child and maternal health.
Our failure to follow through on commitments to help the world’s most
vulnerable populations makes us the international equivalent of a
dead-beat dad.
They say you can tell a lot about someone by the way they treat their mother. This is true, and it goes for whole nations.
We should listen carefully to our
mothers, who are natural environmentalists, humanitarians and leaders.
During conflicts in places like Argentina and Guatemala, mothers led
brave campaigns to stop the killing of their children. Another early
advocate of Mother’s Day in the U.S., Julia Ward Howe, was a pacifist
who called eloquently for disarmament following the bloody American
Civil War.
“Our husbands will not come to us,
reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause,” she wrote in her
Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. “Our sons shall not be taken from us
to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy
and patience.”
Mothers will tell you they want more
than cheap tokens of filial affection. The originator of Mother’s Day as
we know it, U.S. activist Anna Jarvis, became so disgusted by the
proliferation of greeting cards and boxes of chocolate on her holiday,
she spent the last years of her life — and all her inheritance —
campaigning to make the celebration less perfunctory.
I’ve always been a bit of a mama’s
boy. When I graduated from high school, I included a quotation from
James Joyce in my yearbook blurb: “Whatever else is unsure in this
stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.” My girlfriends’
mothers were always fond of me, and I them. I am loyal to my own dear
Ma, who visits often from her home in Massachusetts.
I think deep down, we’re all mama’s
men and women. We all worship at times at the altar of mama. And if we
don’t, may mama help us.
-reprinted from Guelph Mercury