Mother's Day thoughts

It is a pretty day for all the mothers. Cindy has been sleeping late today. We are basically ready to pack the car and get on the road to Dunwoody for Maggie's graduation and the Mother's Day Celebration. It is odd that these colleges are having their graduation ceremonies on Mother's Day Weekend. That is the way that Presbyterian College has been doing it for a long time. Is there a need to combine the celebration of graduation from higher education with the celebration of our mothers? At PC it might make sense, since PC was started as a college for the orphans at the Thornwell home in Clinton, SC. I'm not sure that is the derivation, but it is something to consider. Parenthood is an interesting concept in regard to the differing roles of the father and the mother. The mother is impregnated and she carries the physical burden of the maturation and birth of the child. She has the real, physical connection to the child. It is automatic and immediate. As the child grows in her womb, she cannot help but feel the growth of the child within. The father, on the other hand, is somewhat more tenuous. There is no physical connection, except the sensory connection, and the connection, in some sense, requires the effort of the father. It is an easy thing for a father to walk away. Perhaps that is why it seems to happen so often. It is true that the mother to abandon the child. This too does happen. But she has to turn her back on that physical connection from the gestation period. That has to be hard for a mother to disconnect. It seems common for situations where young mothers have to "grow up" and become a responsible parent to her child, while the father continues to play the carefree adolescent. There is a scene in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities in which the main character comes to his father, a New York lawyer, for assistance when the law comes down on him after the incident in which he runs over the child in the Bronx. The character looks for emotional support and help from his father, but his father offers little more than legal aphorisms toward his legal problem. The main character realizes that his father, despite his age, has not progressed much past seventeen years of age, in consideration of his emotional life. And so it seems with fathers as concerns their children. Mothers are different. It was only after my father passed on that I realized the emotional elements of my father in my life. I remembered how emotional and sentimental my father was. I realized how much I was like him. I saw the poet and artist within him. I see it in my father in law. But today is Mother's Day. I have always been proud of my grandmothers. My grandmother Gary worked in the clerk's office in Christian County and compiled marriage records for books for genealogical research. She was loving and kind and but smart and disciplined. My grandmother Baynham was a teacher and a businesswoman and she took care of the farmhouse and raising my father and caring for my grandfather and was smart and funny and loving. And now that my father is gone, I see the toughness and wisdom of my mother. She is surviving because she took care of the important things. She still does. When I was in college it occurred to me that my father seemed to come to the wrong conclusions for all the right reasons and that my mother always found the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. That may be so, but it is still a matter of conjecture. My mother contiues to give me suppport . She is still my mother. Happy MOther's Day, momma.