Thank You Moms

Everywhere we look in society, we hear tales of courageous moms accomplishing the nigh impossible task of managing the pure chaos that is family life. The keywords there being chaos and life, because it is every bit of a lifelong commitment to dealing with many forms of crazy; from the daily grinds filled with the stereotypical errands that earn the “soccer mom” label, to the sleepless nights battling illnesses and adolescent idiocy. All of the tears, sweat, roller-coaster-emotions, lack of sleep, time, work, money, and sanity shed and sacrificed by mothers for the betterment of their children is worthy of a lifetime of gratitude, not just one day out of each year.

I know I do not tell my wife how thankful I am to have her and how appreciative I am of her daily sacrifices nearly enough. I certainly do not tell my own mother enough. Both of these are inexcusable failures on my part. Failures that I have committed to remedying quickly and diligently. If you think you are as guilty I know I am, I invite you to join me in showing gratitude with your own special ladies. The world could certainly, and always, use more gratitude.

I’m going to start now and leave you with some wise words from Chesterton on the subject. Happy Mother’s Day. I hope it is a great one.

Supposing it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior.

Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist.

Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world.

But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean.

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.

How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

-What’s Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton