Day to Sing Songs
or Write a Silly Card?

I had a friend who used to say, “Mother, Mother, there’s only one (thank God.)”
Always ambivalent about this date, I’m not even sure whether it really traces back to the Greek honoring of Rhea, the Mother of Gods. Not that I’d full heartedly endorse those who think this is a stupid holiday because it celebrates someone who dared to bring us to this cruel world and all that either.
What I do know is that Mother’s Day hasn’t done much to motherhoodat all. Otherwise, how to explain that one woman in seven or eight still dies in pregancy or childbirth in Niger, Afghanistan ans Sierra Leone? Take formal education, for example, which a typical female in Angola, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea and Guinea-Bissau receives less than five years of it. With all the talk about motherhood or career building in most of the industrialized world, it’s always startling to think that Jordanian, Lebanese, Libyan, Moroccan, Oman, Pakistani, and Palestinian women, to name just a few, earn 25 cents or less for every dollar men earn. So I would be careful choosing a day to declare to the world the wonders of motherhood. If anything else, it’s worth thinking that most of those dismaying stats also concern men. And that some of those who stick by the mother of their children’s side, don’t live long enough to see them ushering the kids to a brand new day.