Dear Mom, thanks for ... well, thanks for just about everything

Not all the flowers in the world could repay a mom for all she's done.

By Chris Erskine

May 11, 2017 10 AM PT

If you’re hard up for a Mother’s Day gift, just wrap this ragged column in a box or slip it into an envelope with a crisp new $5 bill. See how she reacts to such a punk prank. If she’s a mother — your mother — she will love it anyway.

Mothers are silly that way. They love us for our failures, our cretinous behavior, our selfish decisions, our shameless flaws.

For the record:

8:55 p.m. Nov. 27, 2024An earlier version of this story misattributed the following quote -- “There is no velvet so soft as a mother’s lap, no rose as lovely as her smile” -- to Archibald Thompson. It was written by 19th century essayist Edward Thomson.

Come on, moms! Get your acts together. If you were any sort of smart, or savvy, or sensible, you’d love us less for our failures and our flaws. Everybody else does. Why not moms? Somehow, amid the inevitable failures and flaws, mothers love us even more.

If a mom sees any sort of shortcoming, she will likely blame herself first. I was too easy on him. I was too tough. He’s a good boy, I know he is.

As you might expect, I struggled as a kid. Mom explained to me that I was merely a late bloomer, that life would eventually become easier.

I said, “Mom, I’m 45!”

She loved me anyway, perhaps the greatest test yet of a mother’s heart.

See, unconditional love is one thing. Then there’s a mother’s love, which is unconditional love with an extra spritz of love’s greatest qualities: Devotion. Faith. Grace.

No one — not a dad, not a lover, not a spouse — will ever do as much for you as your mother did in the very first year you were born.

Then add in all that other stuff — back-to-school sales, birthday parties, scabby knees, loose teeth, a billion loads of smelly socks. Nope, no one will ever do for you what your mother did. “Mothers are like buttons,” an old saying goes. “They hold everything together.”

Extra props for being the first person to ever kiss away our tears.

What do they demand for all they do? A hug, a kiss on the cheek. Of all the relationships in your life, none will be so lopsided.

I’m hardly a serious Christian — I dabble in it, I sip — but I have a special fondness for its principle of absolute forgiveness no matter what. Well, Christianity is an entire religion based around what most mothers do instinctively.

“God could not be everywhere,” Rudyard Kipling once explained, “and therefore he made mothers.”

“An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest,” says an old Spanish proverb.

What do they demand for all they do? A hug, a kiss on the cheek. Take the trash out, wash that dish, make your bed, comb your hair. Of all the relationships in your life, none will be so lopsided. If you gave her all the flowers in Denmark, there still wouldn’t be enough tulips on her sill.

When my wife, Posh, got very sick in late January, I stepped in to cover her motherly chores. We’d always shared the housework, but she covered more of it.

She’d made sure there was lunch meat on Mondays and that the cereal never ran out. She remembered birthdays, kept the counters wiped, let the dogs out, let the dogs in, filled the water bowls, monitored the homework, picked up the dry cleaning, changed the beds, made the coffee.

If a son was in a funk, she made his favorite dinner. When someone sat on the TV remote and we suddenly couldn’t get a signal, she patiently got it working again. By gawd, she could even fix the Wi-Fi.

Mornings were bad, evenings were worse. She’d work her full-time job, then come home to open the mail, start dinner, troubleshoot the laptop, answer her email, answer the phone, pay the taxes, schedule the ortho visit, find a missing baseball shoe — the entire hot and heaping mess of modern motherhood.

Well, when I filled in for Posh while she was sick, it was the most grueling, thankless, kick-in-the-butt three months I’d ever experienced, a marathon of mundane chores and thankless tasks. Early mornings, late nights, and hardly a moment’s rest.

Mostly, it was a reminder that so much of what a mother does is invisible to the rest of us, spiritually and otherwise.

“There is no velvet so soft as a mother’s lap, no rose as lovely as her smile,” wrote 19th century essayist Edward Thomson.

No, all the flowers in the world could never repay your mom for all she’s done. Nor all its diamonds, fancy brunches or finest pearls. It is life’s most unpayable debt.

So try a personal note this weekend to tell her that — as she does — you will “love her no matter what.”

“Dear Mom…” you’ll scribble, and she’ll smile just to see your handwriting.

Just don’t forget the hug.

Happy Mother’s Day.

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Twitter: @erskinetimes

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