“When you have a mother, treasure her with care, for you will only know her value when you see her empty chair”.
We hear quite a lot about children fooling their mothers, but we hardly hear of a mother fooling her children. ‘Mama’ – what a lovely, dear word it is to say and what an appealing meaning it carries with it. We hardly ever care to ponder on its true and noble meaning and, since today we are celebrating Mother’s Day, I feel it is appropriate to show appreciation of our dear mothers’ hard and difficult task on this earth.
A newborn baby lies in a cot. Everybody is rejoicing. Not so far away from this cot, a woman is seen with a smile all over her face. She is the mother, the person whom Divine Providence has permitted to help bring a new creature into the world. The pains of labour turned into the joys of life, notwithstanding that she could have been putting her own life in danger to give life. In such cases, death has – on a number of occasions – been the source of the new life.
As the child grows up, from time to time he or she will face some kind of illness (sometimes serious) and it is the mother (more than the father) who spends nights by his /her bedside weeping and praying to God to pass the illness from the child onto her. She prefers to suffer herself than see her beloved young one suffering. She is ready to sacrifice her happy days – and even her life – for her children.
As soon as she is aware that her children can start learning, she sends them to school. She wants to see her children better than others ... even better than herself. She is prepared to offer the expenses involved in entertaining herself to the benefit of the education of her children.
The children might, sometimes, hurt their mothers’ feelings by their actions but she is ready to accept them in silence without seeing them being punished by their fathers as this might lead to seeing her children being sent to bed without supper – and this she cannot stand.
Sooner or later, these young children become young men and women and, sooner or later, they will leave school, find employment and make new friends. The mother is now even more eager than ever to know where her children are, whose company they are keeping and what places they are frequenting. More likely than not, sometimes this irritates the young men and women, who consider it to be undue intrusion in their lives, and they decide to take it against their mothers without thinking what is behind what they consider to be interference in their ‘modern’ way of life.
As the years go by, wrinkles form on the mother’s face and the time has arrived for her to leave this world of anguish and go to find her most coveted place, the place of no return, the place for which she has probably sacrificed the best years of her life ... near our eternal Mother in Heaven.
I have in front of my eyes the scene depicting a mother lying helpless on her deathbed, unable to utter a single word. She is surrounded by her family, including the children who sometimes did make her suffer – in some cases even without realising or wanting to. She did her utmost for them and now she is sad to leave them alone. But, before leaving them forever, the last words she can murmur are: “Take care of my children; I will help you from the other world.”
Mother is no more. Her place can never again be filled so well. In his song For Mama, Matt Monroe shows how he sacrificed himself for his brothers in order to keep the promise he made to his mother on her deathbed.
May all children whose mothers are still alive resolve to do their best not to hurt their dear mothers, bearing in mind that all the mothers say is for their good and to see them better and happier in their life. May those, whose mother is no longer on this earth, spare a thought and say a prayer for her especially today, Mother’s Day.