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Happy Mothers Day
Honoring Your Mothers
By Frank Kermit
Someone once told me that we enter this world on our mother's pain, and that we leave the world on our own pain.
Looking after my wife during the last intense months of a complicated pregnancy and me insisting that I be in the delivery room when my own child was born, I must agree.
Will I ever be able to fully appreciate my wife enough for everything she sacrificed and went through for our amazing child?
In that sense, will I ever fully appreciate what my own mother sacrificed and went through to give me a chance at life?
I doubt I am even qualified to answer that.
So, how can someone honor his or her mother?
I sometimes face this particular question in my practice during bereavement counseling when a family is struggling with the passing of a mother.
At times, the mourning process may require someone to honor his or her mother's memory with some kind of memorial.
These may include writing about her, naming a structure after her (such as a road, or building wing), starting up a charity fund or scholarship in her memory, and even planting a tree.
However, by far the most powerful way I have found to honor a mother is to take every good value and great experience she gave you, and to pass that love along to your own children as well as to any children who may be in your care at any point in time.
Whatever your own mother's greatest value that she passed on to you, pass on that same trait to others.
Compassion, devotion, life lessons, a love of life, art, teaching…whatever it was that made her special to you; the best way to honor her is to keep her spirit alive each and every time you pass along those traits of hers to your own children, and the children of the world.
When I think of my own mother, I struggle with seeing the now elderly lady who has trouble walking, remembering details and needs to rest frequently.
It is hard to fathom that this is the same superwoman who I remember as being strong of body and spirit, a vibrant Jill-of-all-trades, who never stopped from early morning before anyone else woke up, going on to late night after everyone else went to bed.
She was by no means perfect. No parent is.
The most any mother can be expected to do is the very best she can, with what she has, and that is exactly the legacy my mother has left behind, that I will honor her with, as I pass that love on to my own child.
So, to the mother of my child, to our mothers who gave us life, to the mothers of all my future descendants, to the mothers of my nieces and nephew, to the mothers of mothers, to the mothers of everyone I have ever cared about, to the mothers themselves that I have come to know, and to those special women who came to mother children that weren't originally their own…Thank you and I love you.
Frank Kermit
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