Posted on: Sunday, May 8, 2005
COMMENTARY
Cut mom some slack; she'll thank you for it
By Lori Borgman
Knight Ridder News Service
If you want to do something extra nice for your mom this Mother's Day, try this: Allow her to be human.
We hold mothers to incredibly high standards.
We expect them to be all-knowing, all-seeing, all-loving, all the time, without a single day off, not even a coffee break. (We should have gone union long ago.)
We expect nothing shy of perfection from our mothers.
We expect them to see out of the backs of their heads, administer swift justice from the front seat of a mini-van, and know every child's motivation, mood and shoe size at the drop of a grilled cheese.
Well, sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes mothers crack.
They snap answers, cut loose with an unwarranted tirade, or one day sit at the kitchen table in a daze saying, "Oreos with peanut butter for dinner? Fine. Sure. Whatever."
The fact is, mothers are human. This is a startling revelation to some of you, but it's true.
Mothers are fallible and, as such, they sometimes can be shortsighted. They can say the wrong thing, take a wrong turn, and on rare occasions (and I do emphasize the word rare) make a bad decision.
You think Elvis' mother never once grabbed her pulsating head and begged the kid to give up the guitar and consider accounting? You think Paul Revere's mother didn't beat herself for saying she didn't care how late his friend stayed out, his curfew was midnight? You think Sylvester Stallone's mother doesn't regret telling her son that fighting is never the answer?
Mothers may pretend to know it all, but they don't. Most mothers try to do the best they can with what they have and hope their mistakes don't cause permanent damage.
Consider Joseph Ratzinger's mother. Insiders say she once told her son he didn't have a good head for wearing hats. How was she to know he would one day become pope? And pity poor Emeril's mother. Not even a saint world have the patience for a boy constantly running through the kitchen yelling, "Bam! Bam! Bam!" and adding garlic to everything you cooked.
You have one bad day, one bad moment, one slip of the tongue, and that's what they remember.
Your daughter calls for your help at a frantic time and you tell her to solve her own computer problems. She cups her hand over the phone and tells her friends, "My mother doesn't care that I have a virus."
One time, one measly time, Shakespeare's mother says, "Will, you should go outside and play cricket like the other boys; all this writing can't be good for you," and that's what the neighbor's talk about. Ben Franklin's mother makes one off-the-cuff remark, "You take that kite outside in a storm one more time mister, and I wouldn't want to be in your knickers when your father gets home." They still talk about it at family reunions centuries later.
Mothers are human. They get tired. They get crabby, and on really bad days may try to get even. Mothers long to be perfect, but they aren't.
To err is human, to forgive is a divine gift for Mother's Day.
Lori Borgman is author of "All Stressed Up and No Place To Go."
• • •
Motherhood by the numbers
The Census Bureau sure does think a lot about mothers. The bureau recently released some interesting facts and figures about mothers and Mother's Day for you to enjoy.
Did you know ... The first Mother's Day observance was a church service in 1908 requested by Anna Jarvis, of Philadelphia, to honor her deceased mother.
Jarvis, at an early age, had heard her mother express hope that a day to commemorate all mothers would be established. Her mother had also expressed the sentiment that there were many days dedicated to men but none to mothers.
Two years after her mother's death, Jarvis and friends began a letter-writing campaign to declare a national Mother's Day observance to honor mothers.
In 1914, Congress passed legislation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day.
Facts and figures:
• 82.5 million. Estimated number of mothers of all ages in the United States. (From unpublished Survey of Income and Program Participation data.)
• 68. Percentage of women in Mississippi, ages 15 to 44, who are mothers. This is among the highest rates among states. The national average is 56 percent. • 82. Percentage of women 40 to 44 years old who are mothers. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers. • 10 million. The number of single mothers living with children under 18 years old, up from 3 million in 1970.
• 25.1. The average age of women when they give birth for the first time. That's a record high. The average age has risen nearly four years since 1970. • 2: Average number of children that women today can expect to have in their lifetime. • New moms: 4 million have babies each year. Of this number, about 425,000 are teens ages 15 to 19, and more than 100,000 are age 40 or over. • Less is more? Only about 10 percent of women today end their childbearing years with four or more children. That compares with 36 percent in 1976.
• First babies: 40 percent of births are the mother's first. Another 32 percent are the second-born; 17 percent, third; and 11 percent, fourth or more. • Odds of twins: 1 in 32. The odds of a woman having triplets or other multiple births was approximately 1-in-540. • Working moms: 5.4 million. Number of stay-at-home moms in 2003. Thirty-nine percent of these mothers were under the age of 35.
Among mothers with infant children in 2002, 55 percent are in the labor force, down from a record 59 percent in 1998. This marks the first significant decline in this rate since the Census Bureau began calculating this measure in 1976.
In that year, 31 percent of mothers with infants were in the labor force. Among college-educated women with infant children, 63 percent are in the labor force.
• Daycare centers: More than 687,000 across the country in 2002. These include nearly 69,000 centers employing close to 750,000 workers and another 618,000 self-employed persons or other companies without paid employees.
Many mothers turn to these centers to help juggle motherhood and career.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau. The Bureau notes that some information was collected in surveys and is subject to sampling error.
