Mother's Day: What Makes an Essential Mother?

Mother's Day is tomorrow, and for some of us it is time to celebrate and give thanks to our mothers.  For some of us, whose mother is not around anymore, or who, perhaps, never knew their mother, it might be a day just to celebrate mothers in general.  But what makes an essential mother?  What qualities should we celebrate in our mothers?

There is no essential mother.  However, it is not difficult when searching online to find legions of books and articles about motherhood, each of which proposes some answer to the question:  What is a mother?  You can find things from the left, from the right, from religion, from psychologists, from editorialists, from journalists, and many, many more.  If you seek to find a book about why mothers are strong, you can find it.  If you want to find an article about why mothers are loving, no problem.  If you want to find an article about why mothers should work, that will take no time.  Mothers cooking or not cooking, mothers being strong or sensitive, mothers working alone, or working with their partners--take but a minute of your day, and you'll find exactly the definition you are looking for.

MOTHER is a word that promulgates endless discussion.  Yet, there is no such thing as a mother.  No thing at all.

So why identify "mothers?"  Why qualify it?  Why try to identify it?  Why the plethora of books and articles about "motherhood?"  Why should we categorize it at all?

The most generous answer I can give is that I categorize myself in order to celebrate myself.  As a mother I read a book about motherhood because I want to celebrate myself.  As a black man I read a book about being black in order to celebrate myself.  As a woman I celebrate my womanhood because I want to celebrate myself.   Why not celebrate the good qualities that make up these categories?

Creating categories and identifying with them prepares me to pass judgment on my group, and, more likely, those not in my group.  If I am an American, and I want to celebrate that Americans are smart and hard-working, then there must be some other country with citizens who are less intelligent and less hard working.  If mothers are loving and nurturing, then fathers are probably something else (if they weren't something else, they would be mothers, right?).  If mothers spend time with their family, then if I am traveling, I must not be a mother (or at least a good one).

Moreover, categorizing myself leads me away from the truth.  I have no mother, and I never did or will.  There is no person, place, or thing, that is essentially mother.  There is no category with enough flexibility to hold the truth of any word or category at all.  If I hang on to my identity as mother, I miss the truth that even the word "I" and the ego that associates with it is an illusion.

If by chance tomorrow you are celebrating a person who fits within the category of mother, I wonder if you can see her without that label.  Can you celebrate that person for her basic wisdom, and not for the children she raised?  Can you celebrate that person for negotiating samsara, and not for nurturing and caring?  Can you thank that person for all the wonderful things she has done without once saying, "You were a wonderful mother?"

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