Mother.

There is only One God and there is only one mother.
God knew you before you were born and so did she. She carries you through the grocery store waddling down aisle after aisle looking for food that you need. She carefully gets into the car and fastens a seat belt around the two of you.

She eats for both of you during those enlarging months. (The ice cream is for her, the yogurt is for you.) Mother. Now one, united but soon to be two. Now, as an undefined unity but soon to be separated but forever one.

Then that day, on that one birth day, which in future years, you think is completely dedicated to you and celebrated with friends but rarely with her, she released you to this waiting world where she waits for you more times than you can imagine.

She patiently teaches you how to hold it for either number one or two or for both of them. One day or someday you may teach her how to let go.

She reviews your crayon sketches not knowing what you were attempting to convey but smilingly tells you that it is truly a work of art and worthy of the refrigerator door. (Your first public showing!)

Before her eyes close at night she thinks of you and your safety – and when her eyes open in the morning and the oatmeal needs to be made, she thinks of you once again.

She will drive you where ever you wish to go and sometimes wish not – soccer, football, glee club, drama club, orthodontist, barber and perhaps even a psychologist to help explain your sudden emotional outbursts. You find her to be as demanding as a German commandant and as patient as one who watches paint dry.

She will tickle you, read to you, bathe you, scold and reprimand you for as long as it takes. She will act as president when a decision needs to be made, counselor when your first friend abandons you, priest to help bury the gerbil that she never liked anyway, and most importantly she will be the observer – not to haunt but to guide you skillfully and carefully through misguided choices, impulsive decisions and that wrong friend from that neighborhood.

She will judge and weigh you for the rest of her life but she will never condemn you. She will evaluate you and like a good Chess player always stay at least three moves ahead of you. She may not even play Chess but she will win…every time.

You will finally be on your own and think that you are free of her but (and here’s the haunting part), her messages, mantras, platitudes, absolutes, aphorisms, family secrets that no one can ever know about (but everybody does), all her hopes and dreams for you will continue to filter through and live in your mind, soul and heart.

We are in God’s house this day but mother lives more intimately and personally than any Deity could have imagined. No wonder our Christian God is a jealous God, He has mother to compete with Him.

So, dear Lord, grant them patience, love, wisdom, and the grace to know when to speak and when to remain silent. Grant a special grace to those women who are or will be “Mother” to foster children, adoptive children, or who provide a mother’s touch to children not their own. Strengthen those mothers who are separated from their children. Strengthen those who raise their children without the support of a husband. Heal the hearts of mothers hurt by broken relationships with their children. Comfort mothers who mourn a deceased child, bless, too, those mothers and grandmothers who are now at rest in you.

When she dies her legacy will continue to live within you…whether you like it or not. What started at the grocery store continues now through you. Don’t ignore it. Don’t also heed her enduring messages every time but do not ever forget them. (You may even try to forget them but those messages have not forgotten you.)

Mother. God bless them. God has to bless them. What choice does He have? What could He, in His creative and omnipotent powers, do without them?