Dear Reader,
Alexander Green

Today I’d like to say a few words about an enormously important group of people.

Pastor John S.C. Abbott said they have “as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations as all other earthly causes combined.”

Historian Will Durant called them nothing less than “the nucleus of civilization.”

A Jewish proverb tells us that God created them because He couldn’t be everywhere.

I’m talking, of course, about mothers.

Consider yours. Without her, you wouldn’t be sitting here. Yet biology is the least of it, really.  We would not have survived – not any of us – had we not been deeply loved and cared for in the first years of life.

Your mother is almost certainly your first memory. Yet even before memories, her voice created your first sense of security, her touch your first experience of affection, her constant care and attention the impression that we live in an idyllic world of limitless compassion.

We don’t, of course, but isn’t it a beautiful way to start?

Your mother was your earliest teacher, your strongest advocate, your first love. And as you grew, so did her sacrifices.

When you got sick, she took care of you. When you got in trouble, she took up for you. When you had some place to go … she took you.

As one of four boys, I grew up convinced that my mother’s mission on earth was to be a cook, maid, nurse, counselor, referee and, of course, chauffer. (Peter DeVries once described a mother as someone whose role is “to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car for ever after.”)

In a large household, of course, a mother’s work is never really done. Friends, however, would sometimes remind my Mom how fortunate she was to have five strong men around to help out.

Hmm…

I remember the time a neighbor dropped by during the playoffs. “Hey,” he said looking at the five of us draped across the furniture, “how come all you guys are in here watching the game and your Mom is out front mowing the lawn?”

“I dunno,” I remember saying. “I think she likes it.”

How’s that for appreciation?

In our home, my Mom ran everything, organized everything, remembered everything and, it’s embarrassing to recall, did almost everything that needed doing, too.

To top it off, she made – and still makes – a vegetable soup that is nothing short of spectacular. I don’t mean it’s tasty. I mean it is ambrosia.

(If you’re skeptical that anything truly stunning can be done with vegetable soup, it only means you’ve never tasted hers. No one who has would ever contest the claim.)

A mother’s influence is hard to overstate. In many ways, it is incalculable.

Her love – the strongest, blindest and most exquisite – is neither acquired nor deserved. Nor can it ever be fully acknowledged.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins captures this sentiment beautifully in one of his poems:

The Lanyard The other day as I was riocheting slowly off the pale blue walls of this room, bouncing from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one more suddenly into the past– a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one, if that’s what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sickroom, lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips, set cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim, and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And her is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor. Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift–not the archaic truth that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hands, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Why am I sharing this?

This weekend you have the opportunity to honor the person whose place no one else can take, the woman to whom you owe your very existence.

Perhaps she deserves not a card, a phone call, or a box of chocolates, but an expression of genuine gratitude.

If she is around, cherish her. If she is not, cherish her memory.

Before you were conceived, she wanted you. Before you were born, she loved you. When you arrived, she was willing to sacrifice everything for you.

Is this not one of life’s great miracles?

Carpe Diem,
Alex