Regarding Mothers, Flowers, Clichés and Words

Mother’s Day, like most Days, is a fairly ridiculous thing. On Earth Day, we celebrate our planet and appreciate its grand fragility by recycling our plastics and driving SUVs to environmental awareness gatherings, where we declare our disgust with the wastefulness of mankind. On Memorial Day, we remember the many young men killed in the name of glorious freedom, and how wonderfully tragic it is that they are dead and we are free because of it. On Mother’s Day, we dedicate several hours out of the allotted twenty-four to buying gifts and Hallmark cards to give to the person who sponsored our attempt at existence. So, in reluctant observation of this tradition, I have decided to write a few paragraphs, consisting mainly of words, about the touchingly laughable holiday known as Mother’s Day. Dedicated to my own mother, I feel it will be a most acceptable recompense for the two hundred thousand odd hours of thoughtful love and care my mother has given me.

The problem, of course, with writing about things like boundless love and infinite gratitude, is that that it’s hard to do without slipping into sappy clichés. Clichés have a nasty habit of taking perfectly good emotions and butchering them in the name of comfort and comprehensibility. They inspire feelings only by tapping into pre-existing emotional sockets already well-lubricated by a lifetime of use. At some risk of sacrificing lucidity, I’ll attempt to minimize my use of clichés while I explain what is, in my opinion, the best way to show gratitude towards our mothers, not only on this one day and its twenty four hours of succinct appreciation, but over an entire lifetime.

In spite of Mother’s Day being, as previously mentioned, a ridiculous thing, it is somewhat important to at least attempt to rise to the occasion, a feat which many believe is best accomplished through buying things and then giving them to your mother. I, personally, cannot shake the feeling that perhaps a mother is a thing best appreciated less with roses and more with putting to proper use the life which they have given us. A life well-lived on the part of a child would likely make for an even better gift than even the most marvelously clever greeting card or luscious box of chocolates. The feeling of a job well done is one of the best sensations in the world, and particularly so, I would imagine, when the job is so complex a one as nurturing a small, barely sentient creature into a self-sufficient human being. It follows, then, that the best gift a son or a daughter could give their mother is to live their own life to its fullest potential. I myself have decided that in order to properly honor my mother, I will live from this point onward in a manner of complete perfection. In this way, I will be sure that not one more fraction of a second is wasted squandering the gift she has given me. I have recently sworn a vow to reinforce this attempt at flawless living, and attached a written copy to this essay. I recommend to all those who read this, if they have a mother, to read the attached vow and do the same.

In accordance with my newly affirmed oath, I will live as pristine a life a human can manage, and in doing so, I will be able to do justice to my mother and the fantastic gift of being she has bestowed upon me. For a mother is first and most importantly a vehicle to propel her children into the world, and a child is just the force behind the resounding ripple of such propulsion, which mingles with similarly caused ripples creating the churning undulation in the eddying current we have come to call life. I could continue to allude to metaphors about life and its similarity to large bodies of water, perhaps even branching out into drawing comparisons between humanity’s existence and various stages in the water cycle, but given my earlier condemnation of clichés it may be a bit hypocritical. The point, however, is that a mother’s life is both reflected in and completed by the life of her child, a life she has been so kind as to make possible.

Other than using it to its fullest potential, how do you thank someone for a gift which has an infinite and unfathomable value? If the meaning of life is so goddamn elusive, how is it possible to properly thank the person who gave it to you? In the face of this absurd conundrum, we do the best we can, which often involves such trivialities as roses and words. Some words I am particularly fond of were spoken by a Thai lady-friend of mine. “You are good person Eli,” she said. “I say thank you for your mom, your dad.” I would like to echo her thanks now (for my mom at least, my dad would be quite an inappropriate person to be thankful for today). So, thank you mom. Thank you for giving me this life of mine. It’s something I quite enjoy on occasion, and I’m learning to live it a little bit better every day.

My vow:


I will never be hungry.

I will never feel sad.

I will never grow tired.

I will never get mad.