When asked to explain the pain of childbirth to a man, the legendary comedian Carol Burnett had an answer.
“Take your bottom lip and pull it as far away from your face as you can,” she said. “Now pull it over your head.”
The greatest jokes are soaked in painful truths and that’s one of them.
The pain doesn’t even begin there. Whether women have one child or 20, the agony of monthly menstruation starts in many girls before they’re even officially teenagers and doesn’t stop for another 40 years or so. Even menopause is an ordeal to be endured for a lot of women.
Giving birth is just the first time that moms are tortured by their own children. As we grow up, we inflict continuous pain to the body and soul of our suffering mothers. By the time we are teenagers, we realize our words are weapons and we heap more cruelty on mom. As adults, we abuse her with our silence and our absence. When we have children of our own, we dismiss her supportive wisdom as outdated.
And that’s if we’re good kids.
Some kids lose their way for a variety of reasons, turning to crime and drugs. Some kids get horrible physical and mental illnesses. Some kids die. The kinds of pain mothers know are as wide and as deep as any ocean.
In her book A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, Sue Klebold tries to reconcile the sweet boy she thought she knew and had raised to be a kind young man with the 18-year-old monster who, with a friend, killed 13 classmates and injured 20 more at Columbine High School in April 1999. If the sins of fathers are heaped upon their children, then it seems the sins of the children are piled at the feet of mothers.
Some mothers tragically inflict pain onto their own kids and those women deserve the legal and personal punishment they receive. Yet it’s a miracle that doesn’t happen far more often, considering the amount of suffering mothers endure from their children, their spouses and society itself.
The flowers and cards and affection and well-wishes of Mother’s Day are important. Moms and motherhood are worth celebrating every day that ends with a Y. But let’s also honour our moms this Sunday with the sombre recognition for selfless sacrifice we give to our military veterans each Remembrance Day. Moms everywhere fight and die for their children every day, lest we forget.
To my mom, my wife, the mothers of my three children and to all the moms, thank you from the bottom of my heart. There is no man that has ever lived or ever will live with the heart and strength to do what you do.
