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| The very centre of my world Dryden, ON July 2018 This photo originally shared on Instagram |
Don't let me wrong: I was lucky to have had a mother who managed to get me to adulthood without poisoning me or otherwise inflicting permanent damage. I'm even luckier to have crossed paths with a woman who agreed to become my wife, and proceeded to show me and anyone else who knows her what wonderful motherhood looks, sounds, and feels like. Having a front-row seat to Debbie's adventure through motherhood has been the privilege of my life, and our kids adore her not solely because she gave birth to them, but because she has given everything of herself to them since the moment we knew they were on the way.
And while the basic sentiment of Mother's Day - celebrating moms - is laudable, it doesn't come without its downsides. Not everyone is a mom. Some can't be. Some, like mine, have lost a child. Some moms are no longer with us. Some struggle day-to-day. Perhaps some shouldn't be moms at all. In fact, any defined "-Day" holiday - Father's, Valentine's, whatever - has its own dark side that often gets lost in the commercial push to sell us more crap and adhere to commonly accepted norms of behavior. Card? Check. Flowers? Check. Gift. Check. Good; done for another year.
I'm not really this cynical in real life, but I'm troubled by the complete disregard of the mainstream zeitgeist toward those who don't fit the Mother's-Day-ad ideal. Face it: Humans suck at appreciating those who fall outside preconceived notions of normative lifestyles, backgrounds, and behaviors.
We celebrated Debbie today because she richly deserved to be celebrated. We'll celebrate her tomorrow for precisely the same reason. Indeed, we'll do so every day for however long we're given. We didn't - and never will - need a radio ad to tell us we needed to.
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