Really Celebrate

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It’s a dilemma.  How do we celebrate Mother’s Day during a lockdown?  The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of things.  Given that it was snowing around here yesterday (not to be blamed on the virus), even May doesn’t seem very cooperative this year.  On Friday night I made an emergency trip to Target for essentials.  One of my ulterior motives was to purchase a Mother’s Day card for my wife.  Given the lack of social distancing at the card rack, I wasn’t the only one who had this in mind.  The remainder of the store had shelves of daily necessities picked clean.  How to celebrate moms during a pandemic?  I guess by trying to stay alive.

Those of us far from childhood homes can’t visit our mothers.  Even if we could we couldn’t take them out for dinner.  If we send flowers we can’t send gloves to protect their fingers—the stores are out of those.  If we send flowers to plant we have to send plastic to cover them too, having had four nights with freeze warnings in a row.  Talking to my Mom yesterday she recollected the year that it snowed on Memorial Day.  I shouldn’t complain.  Mom would rather I didn’t.

Perhaps the best we can do for Mother’s Day is to start treating all women better.  One commemorative day a year doesn’t make up for a lifetime of second-class citizenship.  Our mothers are the reason all of us are here.  Isn’t that reason enough to see we’re all part of a single family?  Women put up with a lot to take care of us.  Even so we deny them an amendment granting them equal rights.  Politicians are saying “Happy Mother’s Day” even as they continue to withhold basic human rights from women.  We could celebrate Mother’s Day by putting our sentiments into action, transforming daily life into equal pay and equal protections.

There’s a pandemic outside.  There’s some snow out there too.  But there’s a warmth inside and for that we have our mothers to thank.  If we really mean it when we send our mothers cards and flowers, if we really mean it when we call, if we really mean it when we give her a hug, we’ll show it by our actions every other day of the year.  We need to be sincere when we say it, or don’t say it at all.  Happy Mother’s Day!

Half of Us

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Today is International Women’s Day.  We need to pause a moment and think.  We can’t change the past, but we can improve on it.  I think it’s fair to say that historically—before the Enlightenment anyway—domestic arrangements were the product of evolution rather than intention.  Like religion, however, domestic arrangements have a difficult time keeping up with change in real time.  By the time healthcare improved and women’s chances of surviving childbearing grew, men had become set in their ways.  Even now we still have trouble getting a female on a presidential ballot in “the most advanced” country in the world.  The week before International Women’s Day Elizabeth Warren stepped out of the race.  The rational world is so desperate to get the anomaly out of the White House that it hasn’t really dawned what a lost opportunity this was.

Although for most of history their roles have been hidden, half the advances of the human race belong fairly to women.  Males often have difficulty admitting that they require help, or had any assistance getting to where they are.  In fact, though, we know they had mothers and those mothers helped make them who they were.  Many of them had spouses who kept the situation stable enough that they could go on and follow their preoccupations.  History, unfortunately, would record only the names of the men.  In the western world this was often reflected in the changing of names during marriage.  Domesticity comes with a price, but it can be balanced out.

Capitalism, it seems to me, rewards the greedy.  Instead of evening things out so that those who don’t have the same opportunities can be cared for, our economic system rewards selfishness.  I often wonder if women would’ve been so suppressed had a more humane measure of human worth been adopted.  When I think of billionaires whose names I’ve never heard of before, I always mentally add, “they wouldn’t be billionaires if the rest of us refused to play the game.”  It’s only because we agree to an arbitrary and artificial valuing system that we allow the obscure to “own” far more than the rest of us.  Women, it seems to me, would know the realities of this way better than most men do.  What if the value system we shared measured worth in having had a mother?  It’s something we all share.  Yet in this nation we still haven’t passed the Equal Rights Amendment.  The time has come to ask ourselves what’s really important.  Today should be the answer.