Show Her You Care

This past Sunday was of course Mother’s Day – a time to celebrate all that our moms do for us. Usually this means showing your mom an appropriate amount of gratitude by making her breakfast or taking her out to lunch, and then expecting her to have dinner ready at the regularly scheduled time.

Sure, on paper this sounds pretty fair. But if you really think about it, moms get the short end of the stick. Aside from only getting one day in their honor, that day (Sunday) happens to be a day that they normally have off from their job anyway, but not a day that they have off from taking care of the demons (I mean kids) that make them moms. And stay-at-home moms never have a day off from taking care of demons (whoops, I mean kids). At the very least, moms should get a day off from work AND from the demons (damnit! I mean kids).

In all seriousness, as someone who has been in a delivery room during the birth of a child, moms should get a week celebrated in their honor just for that. For crying out loud, where I’m from the entire town celebrates for two weeks prior to a bunch of horses running around a track; an event that never lasts more than two minutes. If every two-minute period that my wife spent in labor with our son equaled two weeks of celebrating afterwards, we’d embarrass Lindsay Lohan.

And consider all the other days we celebrate. Despite having no ethnic ties to the holiday, plenty of non-Hispanic people in this country raise a glass on Cinco de Mayo. Same thing with St. Patrick’s Day. And you know who else gets a whole day named after him? A giant rodent that has to be pulled out of the ground by people way overdressed for the occasion simply to ritualistically “predict” six more weeks of winter. Has the damn squirrel ever not predicted six more weeks of winter? Groundhog Day has never given us a reason to celebrate (but in all fairness, it is a great movie).

So I think we can do better. Hopefully you gave your mom the whole day off on Sunday, and if you didn’t, do it this weekend. And next weekend. And maybe a few whole weeks here and there. Devote as much time to showing her your appreciation as she devoted to you.

Then again, if we adequately celebrated our moms, we wouldn’t get anything else done, including preparing our kids to leave home. And according to my mom, that’s when the real celebration begins.