THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
The celebrating of mothers and motherhood can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans, who held festivals in honour of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele, but the clearest modern precedent for Mother’s Day is the early Christian festival known as Mothering Sunday.
Once a major tradition here and in parts of Europe, this celebration fell on the fourth Sunday in Lent – like it does now – and was originally seen as a time when the faithful would return to their ‘mother church’ for a special service.
Over time the Mothering Sunday tradition evolved into a more secular holiday, and children would present their mothers with flowers and other tokens of appreciation. This custom eventually faded in popularity before merging with the American Mother’s Day in the 1930s and 1940s, although in the US it is celebrated in June.
Did you know more phone calls are made globally on Mother’s Day than any other day of the year?
My maternal grandmother died when my mother was just five, so she never had a lifetime to know her. When I came into this world, the first of three, and work took my father away a lot, my paternal grandmother came to call for an afternoon of china-cupped tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
My mother was thrilled to have another woman, a mother-like figure, visit, at what was an anxious time, and when she was leaving my dear mother said to her: “Please come any time. Don’t wait to be invited.” To which my grandmother replied: “Listen here, I raised eight — I am not about to rear a ninth.”
And from that day ‘til the day she died 26 years later the Old Bat never once darkened our door again. It goes without saying that my late mother did a wonderful job rearing me and my two siblings. The very epitome of good nurturing.
Mothers come in all shapes and sizes and degrees of ‘old batdom’. There are professional, or homemaker ones, in broad terms or fashionable, pious, simple, strict, soft, conservative, modern and, nowadays, cool mums. There are mums, moms, mams and mammies, not to mention mummy, yummy or not, The Ma or the Old Dear.
My own mother was not necessarily of those traits that mark celebrity in that she never wrote a book, nor composed a song, nor won a Nobel Prize, nor made a movie nor had her name writ large in lights, nor caused an international stir. My mother was so ordinary that she was, dare I say, extra ordinary. That’s it — my mother was an Extraordinary Mother. Like most good mothers are, unquestioning and unflinching in their love for their children. A mother’s love.
And, of course, ‘grown’ “don’t mean nothing to a mother”, as the novelist Toni Morrison put it in her award-winning book Beloved. “A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing,” wrote Morrison.
My own three ‘children’ now ‘grown’ into confident and competent young adults are testimony to the love their mother bestowed on them and there exists between them a bond that is unknowable to me and which I can never hope to be part of. But I guess that comes with the father territory.
The late Seamus Heaney said his father was notably sparing of talk but that his mother “notably ready to speak out”, a circumstance which the poet believed to have been fundamental to the “quarrel with himself” out of which his poetry arose.
I like to think the novelist Washington Irving had it succinctly when he wrote: “A mother is the truest friend we have when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavour by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.”
But let’s leave the last lines to Oscar Wilde: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’
