by Fidelia Echezona

Created on: May 09, 2008

Lucky people still have their mothers around. They can't imagine how those of us who have lost ours feel. If they knew, they won't mind making all the fuss in the world to say their say: "Mommy, I love you. I appreciate you. I owe my life to you." After mothers leave this world, we wish we had said enough to make them know how much we love and appreciate them.

Mothers sweat and languish for months trying to hold their offspring safe inside their bodies, often in great danger of losing their own lives. Moments of greatest anxiety and troubled anticipation follow day after day, night after night. At the long last, the momentous experience of painful severance ushers in an unending attachment. The new spirit enters the world angry. Ranking most helpless among mammalian babies, we come equipped with nothing to defend ourselves. Only compassion in a mother's heart ensures our survival after three minutes! The arduous and unending journey begins with us not taking any steps.
Mothers spend endless time nourishing, grooming, growing, encouraging, teaching, admonishing, disciplining, guiding, guarding, minding us. Their chore never ends until they die. An uneducated Musician says it all:

"Sweet Mother! Sweet Mother O!
I never forget the suffer way you suffer for me-o-o!
When I hungry, my Mother go run up and down
Go find me something I go chop-o.
If I no sleep, my Mother no go sleep.
If no eat, my Mother no go eat.
When I sleep, she cover me cloth
Say Make you sleep, sleep, sleep, my pikin-o.'
When I sick, my mother go cry, cry, cry:
God help me, God help me, my pikin-o!'
She never tire-o-o! Sweet Mother-o-o!

After I had my own children, I realized for the first time, the immeasurable time it took my mother to raise me. Contemplating on the change that came over an 8-Ib bundle of bloody flesh, one bore barely 41 years earlier is mind bugling; even more stunning is to become aware of the countless chores mothers had to perform to grow a child! It seems like only yesterday when I beheld my first daughter. Even though she had lived inside me for several months, I was shocked when I saw her for the first time. For her, it was no laughing matter. She vehemently protested as to say: "What is this all about? Take me out of here. I am not comfortable! I mean it. Whoa-a-a-! Hours of patient petting, grooming, caring, crying whenever she had fever, anxiety when she was sad, mentoring, advising, etc had turned her stay into a happy and useful life. That was 41 years ago. Today, I watched with amazement as she successfully opened up a young mother and took out a bouncing baby who repeated her angry entrance into our world.
This year's Mother's Day, as in other Mother's Days ahead, till I die, my admiration for my mother (of blessed memory), will never diminish for two reasons: her patience as she taught me who I am; and her wisdom in defining reality for me.
Yes Mother's Day should be celebrated with huge emotional fanfare because Motherhood is a miracle of the highest order!

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