Mother's Day remembering

Repost from When I Was 69 blog, date 5/9/2021  

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My mother who worked an 8 hour job, then came home and fixed dinner and did our laundry and the house cleaning until we were teenagers, and did all the shopping. My father worked the same hours and came home and read the newspaper, and sometimes fixed cars, or mowed grass, or did carpentry...men's work around a home. I do remember a few times my dad would tell me, when my mother was behind her bedroom door, "she just needed to lie down for a while."

Mataley before she married my father.

I'm so grateful that I was a mother in the 60s and 70s...women's lib, moving into civil rights, and then the consciousness of children's rights. The children still are not protected anywhere near enough from suffering in many ways...but I guess parents have rights too. We keep talking (politically) of a minimum wage that would actually allow the poor among us to have housing and food. So far it's not adequate.

So the civil right that still needs addressing is classism. It has become more evident with the rich getting richer with tax rules in their favor. As one wise saying goes, you can't ask the rich to give up what they have by passing laws which would take it from them. So it is a hard battle. But all civil rights have been.

Glad I had the mother I had.

Hope you had a mother you got a lot from as well.

Last night's dream was of cats and kittens. That's somehow close to my sense of parenting.

And happy mother's day to my daughters-in-law who mothered my grandchildren!

A rather old photo of a mother's day with my oldest son and his first wife and kids...the youngest of whom just graduated from college!

And here's a salute to all the women who chose to be creative without having children!

Today's quote:

​"No woman should say, 'I am but a woman!' But a woman! What more can you ask to be? Born a woman — born with the average brain of humanity — born with more than the average heart — if you are mortal, what higher destiny could you have? No matter where you are nor what you are, you are a power."

 

Maria Mitchell, astronomer,  In her Life, Letters, and Journals, founding memeber of the American Association for the Advancement of Women.