Other places suggest candy or flowers. For some, we suggest a different kind of Mother’s Day present.
Why don’t you send or print some of the email or forum messages you’ve sent over the past few months. No, not the best ones. The worst ones. You know, the ones where a casual observer might think the first words out of your mouth was not “Mama” or “Papa,” but “F— you?”
Or maybe you can have some of the recent participants in (or perhaps victims of) your love life tell her how much you learned about respecting women from her?
She’ll be so proud of you.
Oh, she won’t be? So why did you do them?
You are in part a product of your mother’s handiwork, and a sign of it. People look at you, and see a glimpse of her.
Truly honoring your mother does not begin and end with some good-tasting or smelling bribe one day of the year. Honoring her means carrying on her goodness throughout your life.
Mother’s Day is not a ritual; it’s a lifestyle.
Your parents give you a piece of themselves, a piece that echoes in you and in your descendants long after they are gone from this earthly realm. The older you get, the more you’ll realize that.
Do you nurture the best part of her piece in a way that leaves people saying, “His mother should be proud of him?” Or do you give them reason to think something else about your mother, something not so complementary?
Why not the best?
Mothers are human, though at their best they become more than that. Despite that, they have faults like the rest of us. That’s something many of us have no problems blaming them for in life. Sometimes, even rightly.
However, that is like looking at a garden and just seeing the weeds. What about the pretty flowers they gave you, too? At least blame them for that, too.
Consider the piece of your mother that is in yourself to be a garden. Maybe it’s immaculate; maybe it’s pretty weedy, most likely, it’s somewhere inbetween.
Rather than just complain about the weeds, or even try to grow more, would it not be better to hoe the garden, remove the weeds, and cultivate the beautiful flowers that are there? Maybe make your garden even more beautiful than hers?
Are you cultivating that inheritance, or letting it go to weed?
Think about it.
Be the first to comment