Here’s why moms deserve their day

This one’s for mothers, especially those who never intended to wind up on our TV screens, which is where life brought them.

Maybe it was the lure of the streets that led to the ending of a loved one’s life; grief is hard enough to absorb without having to accept it was born of bad choices, such as hanging with the wrong crowd.

There’s no redeeming honor in that, no higher cause to ease the pain.

It’s not like a soldier’s death, where there’s pride in sacrifice, or the death of a cop or firefighter where there’s nobility in laying down one’s life for others.

It’s more like dying at the hands of a drunken driver, making the life that was lost the collateral damage of a badly reeling society.

Even disease is easier to accept because it has no bad guys.

But whatever produces their heartbreak, grieving mothers touch a special nerve here because their pain is so palpable.

So on this Mother’s Day weekend, this is just to let them know that others care.

Over the years, a favorite Mother’s Day story here told of the time a columnist, looking for a story, found Bobby Orr’s mother, Arva, and said, “Tell me, Mrs. Orr, you must be very proud of your son.”

“Which one?” she replied. “I have three.”

But sometimes sharing upbeat stories feels like whistling past the graveyard and there are too many graveyards in the news these days.

Some years ago a deranged 23-year-old Milton man gruesomely killed two of his younger sisters with a knife before police shot him to death. When it came time for the funerals their mother had all three buried together, explaining she had borne and loved them all.

Perhaps only another mother can fully understand that.

Back in the ’90s, a father who had taken his young girls to Florida, dishonestly telling them their birth mother was an alcoholic who never wanted them, was located and brought back here accompanied by his girlfriend.

The girls, now stunning young women, had so bonded with her that they wouldn’t even look at their birth mother in the courtroom.

So a writer called his own wife to ask, “What would that birth mother remember that the girlfriend could never know?”

“Well, she’d remember the first time they kicked in her belly, the first time they rolled over inside her.”

“You’ve never forgotten that?”

“A mother never forgets,” she said.

So if you’re a mother, whatever life has tossed your way, this one’s for you.

Happy Mother’s Day!