Celebrating Motherhood

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With Mother’s Day just three days hence, it’s time to pull out all the stops. Go to the store and purchase a card for your mother or any other mothers in your life with emotional connections to you and yours. Send the card today if you haven’t already done so, and firm up your plans for Sunday, even if that means just making your iPhone beep at you in the morning to remind you to call her.

Personally, I don’t go out with my family anymore for Mother’s Day. It’s far too crowded and overwhelming out there in restaurant land, and not unlike Valentine’s Day, there are simply too many shades of pink and too much smiling at times.

Quieter celebrations are more my cup of tea these days. Let’s grill or have a coffee and listen to music. If you let me nap on Mother’s Day that’s probably the nicest thing in the world; spending money on me will just make me think about the cable bill and that’s not happiness. My own mother is so aggressively enjoying her life as a wife and retiree that I have to catch her by the hem of her skirt as she breezes in and out of the country, in and out of the state, and in and out of her role as mother and grandmother. She is wholly her own person now, and we are honored just to have rare, lovely, fleeting moments with her. My husband’s mother, too, is a force to be reckoned with: ready to live and live out loud, celebrating her life every day, and not just waiting around for some bouquet.

So we put the invitations out there but largely we are too sleepy a town for them to linger in and they thank us and move on, back into the thrilling adventure of their sixties and beyond.

In honoring our own mothers, our own motherhood and the mothers in our lives, we are celebrating the very essence of life itself. Whether we are childless, adopted, adopters, or have losses too deep to label, originally we did come from a mother and have mothering in us.

Mothering has gotten such a mixed bag of blame and worship, it's totally tattered in many ways and needs a place of quietude and reverence in our society, without all the simultaneous blame, shame and overblown pomp and circumstance. Just to breathe the motherhood of the world is to honor the origin of life, our lives, the lives we touch and embrace. If you have a loved one you are loving and mothering on some level or if you have a pet, the same is true. Motherhood is omnipresent in all our acts of careful caring and planning for others, in all our creating and doing in the world.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Aimee Boyle lives and works on the shoreline of CT. She is a regular contributor to EmpowHER.

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