Love You Mum

Mothers are sort of like that!
by Dawn Dillon Barrett

To commemorate Mother’s Day, I have been asking some people what they think is the most important quality a mother should have. The replies were varied, but most of them could be put into one of three categories: love, a sense of humor and endurance.
Next to romance, I suppose the subject of motherhood stirs up more emotion than any other in existence. Statesmen give their mothers credit for the fine people they have become, especially during political campaigns, sailors tattoo the word on their biceps, and even a hardened criminal will defend his mother to the death.

Mothers are important; everybody knows that. Civilization would have died out rather quickly without them. Adam certainly couldn’t have gone it alone, even though he was quick to blame the woman when the fat hit the fire in the Garden.

But mothers also tend to get blamed for things. Old Sigmund Freud was a past master at that, making moms the scapegoats for most of the craziness in the world. Well, folks have always needed to blame somebody for driving them nuts.

Mothers. Books have been written about them; speeches laud them. But mothers as a group tend to defy description, perhaps, because like the rest of humanity, they’re all different. But all mothers have some things in common. So, in a feeble attempt to define that universality, I’ve listed a few similarities:

A mother is the lady who gets to sit in the front seat with your father and who spits on her handkerchief and cleans your face just before you get where you’re going.

She’s the one who, when you throw up all down the wall because you were sleeping in the top bunk and didn’t know you were going to be sick until it was too late, takes care of you before she scrubs the wall.

Mothers come in all shapes, sizes and attitudes. Some are short and squatty, others tall and thin. But all of them have laps that fit and arms that protect when you’re sick or hurt or scared....