I consider myself to be a World Mother, there are lots of us about, some World Mothers are men. I don’t live with any children, I have not given birth to any children, but  my life includes lots of  joyous mothering, to both kids and adults. Join me in my quest to make Mothering Sunday a day to celebrate all types of ‘mothering’.

I am interested in the  way this particular commercial hyped up  festival has developed over the years, and how far the tradition of Mothering_Sunday (click to read) has changed since it was introduced as a religious festival.

In  times gone by, it was the Sunday  half way through Lent when people were allowed to return to their ‘mother church’. Servants were given the day off, to go back to the church of their childhood, which usually meant visiting their families. With children as young as 10 years old being in service, this was often one of the only days in the year that families might have had the chance to all be together. So the ‘mother’ in this particular event started off as the church, the faith, the spirit, the parish where someone was brought up, not the biological  mother.

Only later did it become a more literal day for  mostly biological mothers, and yes, it is good to have a time to say thanks to your mum for bringing you into the world and looking after you, if she did. The thing I find sad is that the spiritual universal concept of  ‘mothering ‘ is somehow being overlooked for something that is just  a trifle manufactured, over sentimental and  rather exclusive. You don’t have to have given birth to ‘mother’, you don’t have to be female to ‘mother’. Once again we have been pressurised by the commercial world to feel sort of duty bound to romanticise the way we feel about our mothers, or there will be tears before bedtime!

Here is a festival that is now mostly for women who have given birth and all other types of world mothers and nurturers get marginalised. And if one more person tells me that I cannot understand the connection with another living being unless I give birth to them, I shall have to do something really British like ‘tut’ quite quietly under my breath.

In our Western commercial world ‘Mother’s Day’ is a very hard day for people both young and older who have lost mothers, for people who have lost kids, or cannot for some reason be parents. It is in our face from the day after Valentines, and every year it seems to get more and more commercialised.  If we saw the day as a festival to thank  or reflect on anyone in our lives who ‘mothered’ us, whether it be our church, our temple, our spiritual teachers, our school teachers, our parents, our friends, our partners – if this was a day when we concentrated some energy on all the children in the world who have no parents ( ‎43 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa are orphans), I think the day would sit much more lovingly in the world. Well what a bundle of joy I am today! have a good weekend everyone…Happy Mothering Sunday to all of us! x x x

SONG OF THE DAY

CELINE DION -BECAUSE YOU LOVED ME

Its cheesy, but it so good…….’my world is such a better place because of you’. Thanks to all the mothers and the lovers and the people who believe in us.