A day to remember

I suppose every year about this time my thoughts will return to mother - though not a day ever goes by when I don't think of her at least a hundred times.

In some ways, it's funny that we have only one day set aside to honor our mothers when in truth we might well have to add days to the calendar to fully account for everything they do for us and mean to us.

My mother was in some ways like every other woman who has borne children into the world - utterly devoted and yet a little bewildered by what we might become, eager to see us succeed and yet hesitant to let us go, the source of our success - yet sure she had somehow let us down.

Perhaps, in the end, what is most certain about motherhood is that it is a paradox. This is most clearly observed in taking note of the fact that mothers are children, too, which makes each of them one link in a chain where each link is a snake that has swallowed its own tail.

As much as our mothers are the source of all our fundamental understanding of the world, when they put the kids to bed, they would like nothing more than to pick up the phone and have a long talk with their own mothers to be told, "There, there, everything will be all right."

That is the magic of motherhood. Its love and wisdom can be passed on from generation to generation, even when the particular mother in the chain has no idea how she does it.

When my mother was making sense of my world, for instance, teaching me pat-a-cake and hoisting me onto the hobby horse so I could learn about appropriate risk-taking, she was also aflounder in her own world - confused, unloved and trapped in a marriage that had been a mistake.

What my mother would have wished for more than anything was a mother of her own to point her in the right direction and show her the way to inner peace and a sense of accomplishment. But that didn't happen. Grandma didn't know the way.

Now, don't get me wrong. From my perspective Grandma was a saint, especially when she slipped a five-dollar bill into my tiny fist and told me to "Keep it quiet, Frankie" at the end of a visit when the whole house smelled like spaghetti sauce and garlic bread.

But Grandma was raised in another world, and she measured love at a much more practical, pragmatic scale than either my mother or I would. Grandma had seen three of her brothers and sisters die in infancy, and more of them die in youth. She lived in a hard world and had a hard love and it was perhaps, therefore, not surprising that she never developed her nurturing skills beyond the ones that could be practiced in the kitchen.

Still, somehow my mom managed to find within herself the tools that she needed to give my brother and me a sense of home, a sense of security and a sense of adventure - even when she struggled to achieve those for herself. I suspect there was something in her own childhood, perhaps in Grandma's touch or voice, that had taught her what she needed to know, but there was also a determination about my mother that made her reach farther and higher than she was supposed to do.

That individual accomplishment of my mother - giving my brother and me that which she was never able to have for herself - is for me the ideal of motherhood, and ultimately the ideal of humanity.

Most of us will never live the lives we want to. There is just too much that gets in the way. Obligations, social impediments, character flaws. You name it. We are almost never quite as big as our dreams.

But even so, we have a chance to rise above what we were meant to be. Most mothers - and most fathers, too - do that when they raise their children. Although sickness is passed from generation to generation, and that taints many families - it is much more common for love to be passed instead.

That is the greatness of motherhood.

If we can only learn one lesson from our mothers, it should be this: No matter where we came from, we are good enough to love and be loved, and we are too good to be hurt too badly. We deserve the very best, and when something goes wrong - as it inevitable does - there will always be someone to whisper in our ear, "There, there, everything will be all right. I love you, baby, and I always will."

Thanks Mom, for everything.