Motherhood is sustained through the ages

MOTHER’S Day. It’s a poignant celebration for many, evoking lots of emotions. Some people haven’t got Mums. Others have never known their mother. Many have been adopted by women who become their “Mums”. This very day, there will be children all over the world being separated from their Mum in places like Ukraine, Yemen, all countries with strife that breaks up families.

For many of us, it’s the time to remember that person who knew us longer and better than any other person on earth. Who saw through our wiles, recognised our strengths, boosted our weaknesses and, if they were good at their job, guided us to make the right choices in our formative years, taught us how to Love, how to show respect, how to pull our weight in not just a family environment but in society.

The role of a Mum is probably the hardest job in the world. I’ve always said that bringing up children is far harder than working for a living. The responsibility of another life means the buck very often stops at the mother’s feet. There are, of course, millions of single Dads, but historically women have often been the ones sitting in the caves nurturing the young, keeping family life together during wars or, in many cases, being the house mother who keeps the home fires burning while their partner is employed.

I recently met a couple of chaps in Chicago who had adopted newborn babies. I was so full of respect for them for what they were doing, not least because the children were born with fetal alcohol syndrome through the mothers drinking during pregnancy. This can lead to a range of issues, both physical and mental.

The couple were well aware of the issues their new family would face, but carried on undaunted.

Raising children from birth as a man is, I’m sure, far more difficult than raising children as a woman at one level. Any Mum will tell you that after birth, a woman’s horizons suddenly narrow because their hormones create a powerful maternal instinct and they kick in a whole cocktail of chemicals, oxytocin, beta endorphins, epinephrine, norepinephrine, prolactin. It’s nature’s way of ensuring you don’t give birth and get up and leave the baby on the bus. There’s a primeval instinct that kicks in purely from those hormones and in many ways it makes mothering much easier.

For chaps, though, they don’t have that. No taut huge boobs at two in the morning that wake you, reminding you that a feed is due. Without those emotions, men have to work twice as hard to tune in, read their babies, and I take my hat off to them.

Is Mother’s Day a day that is truly respected and acknowledged for us Mums? Or is it just a commercial hype to sell more cards, flowers, chocolates?

Anna Jarvis hated the commercialisation of Mother’s Day, despite having invented it. Her Mum, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died in 1905. So Anna, an American, decided to create Mother’s Day to honour the sacrifices mothers made for their children. It became a concept that was taken on in different forms the world over. As the concept of Mother’s Day grew and grew, Anna spent her time trying to denounce the hype that had been created by businesses and worked hard but failed to have it removed from the calendar.

Anna may not have known that she wasn’t the first to create a “Mothering Sunday”. The Greeks and Romans got in there first, holding festivals to honour Mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele. Then the early Christians celebrated Mothers on the fourth Sunday in Lent, when the faithful would return to their “mother church” – the main one in their area for a special service.

I feel hugely privileged to have experienced motherhood. My four children have been a constant source of inspiration and have taught me many things. Being a Mum is, for me, sometimes excruciatingly painful. I’m not the only woman who will acknowledge that they Love too much. Even though the umbilical is severed, it doesn’t stop me grizzling on the plane on the way back from Chicago, as I did last week, saying goodbye to my eldest, and now, another layer of emotions, to two small grandchildren. The pain, for me, is really physical and doesn’t get better with time. But I’m blessed to know the sweet side of that relationship and know how lucky I am to have children who care about me.

Motherhood is very complex and, if you’re a half-decent Mum, you’ll realise you’ve signed up to a myriad of roles that has no retirement age, that you’ll worry about your offspring until you trot off this mortal coil. For many women in Ukraine, motherhood may be snatched from them with the evacuation, injury or death of their children. Tomorrow, they’re the ones we should remember in our thoughts, and hope that they might one day celebrate the day in peace.

‘If you’re a half-decent Mum, you’ll realise you’ve signed up to a myriad of roles that has no retirement age’

A young baby looks out of a window as people leave Lviv, Ukraine, on a train for Poland as they flee their homeland