Making Mother's Day Meaningful (or Mother's Day is Meaningless if You Don't Live Past Childbirth)
Wed May 07, 2008 at 04:35:25 PM PDT
Growing up, Mother's Day was always about doting on my maternal grandmother. She wanted her brunch, or at the very least, a nice handmade Mother's Day card. My mother would always claim that she didn't care about the holiday, personally, we just needed to keep my grandmother happy.
To some extent, I share my mother's nonchalance about the holiday. (Perhaps to be totally fair, I would better describe my feelings as "Stupid over-commercialized holiday that can't possibly compensate for all societal gender inequity in one day but YOU'D BETTER GET ME SOMETHING NICE OR ELSE.") After all, while my life is not without its irritations, overall, it's pretty sweet right now. I get to work part time, my husband is an involved parent, and our sweet girl gives us lots of hugs and lets me know every day that she enjoys my company. One day of brunch and flowers is neither going to top that nor adequately compensate for 20 months of not quite enough sleep...
But recently, a couple of web links have made me take stock of Mother's Day's meaning.
First, somebody posted a heart-rending story to a mommy board about a friend of hers who died unexpectedly the day after giving birth to her first child. Her grief-stricken husband is raising the little girl alone and chronicling his journey in his blog.
Then last week, I read a story in the London Guardian, "Millions of Mothers Lost." The shocking loss that this blogging family experienced is repeated countless times every day, around the world.
Lack of access to health care, lack of transportation, and fear of the repercussions of receiving care (sometimes the male members of the family refuse permission!) are maiming and killing women and hurting their families.
Babies and young children who have lost their mothers in childbirth are up to 10 times more likely to die prematurely than their peers. McConville tells me of a woman she met in a town in Somalia, known "as the Town of Death[...] There were five children sitting around, eating out of a bowl in the middle, and their mother was a local nurse, called Nurta. As we talked, she said, 'See that little boy', and she pointed to one of the children, 'I've never told him this, but he's not my son. I was working in the town, a few years ago, during one of the waves of famine, and I found a woman who had died on the street, who had this newborn baby still suckling her breast. I couldn't do anything for her. All I could do was to pick up her baby, and bring him home'."
Since I read the blog and the article, the two have been haunting my brain. Shouldn't that single father be honored on Mother's Day and Father's Day, since he's doing the work of both under extraordinary circumstances? Yet his family's tragedy is only one out of thousands (and I should note that he describes it as just "bad luck" - not anybody's fault). What can be done to prevent future deaths in other families?
So, instead of focusing on Mother's Day as a day about me, I am going to try to think of it as a day about the greater good. Every mother should be honored? Hell, every mother should survive childbirth! Is that so much to ask?
So in honor of all the mothers out there, never mind the Tiffany jewelry. Visit the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood and learn what you can do to help.
