Small Good News: Happy Mothers Days, All Year 'Round

Small Good News: Happy Mothers Days, All Year 'Round
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As soon as my daughter was old enough to register my meaning, I explained that Mother's Day was not a holiday I felt the need to celebrate. To a slightly last-minute mom lucky enough to have a splendid kid, every day is Mother's Day, even the ones where some misunderstanding or misdeed make us doubt it temporarily.

It is a holiday fraught with the potential for guilt - the child forgets, the child is busy, the child spent her bouquet money on a new purse. Why set the stage for distress?

But it can feel odd to be running errands when everyone else seems to be headed out to eat. When I passed two young smiling cops on Sunday, I said, "Good Morning," my default strategy for making human contact when I'm feeling alone.

"Happy Mother's Day," they said.

For the first time in my life, I heard it differently: Not as a holiday that celebrated mothers, but as a day for happy mothers; in grammatical terms, happy did not modify mothers' day, and happy mothers was a noun. The day belonged to happy mothers, which somehow freed it from the constraints of greeting cards and brunch reservations.

I got maybe ten steps further before the tears welled up. What was that about? Not self-pity for being without a mimosa or a giant omelette, because I sit so high on the mom scale of happiness that you'd need an extension ladder to reach me.

I turned around and yelled back, "Did you call your mothers?", and they both laughed and said yes. But I didn't ask because of Mother's Day. I asked because they had said something nice to me and I felt compelled to return the gesture, to acknowledge that they clearly had family on their minds.

The small good news, here, is that we are still capable of the decent exchange, the non-Twitter, non-recession, non-eblast bit of communication. You may be disappointed that I'm not writing about upper-case activism this week, about Things We Can Do, but the extremely old-fashioned notion of common courtesy, of small attentions, is part of the foundation on which we can build bigger efforts.

The two cops were the last in a string of people with whom I had more-than-expected exchanges this week. I know that the intake worker at the ER has allergies and a weakness for nice shoes because I asked her what magazine she was reading as I waited to find out that my ankle was not broken but sprained. A hospital employee who shall remain nameless told me he didn't see a fracture but would I please wait to speak to someone whose name ended in M.D. before I began to celebrate - all because I started a conversation with him while he was taking his pictures, which made me a person instead of an ankle, which made him want to do the right thing.

This is beginning to sound like Frank Capra to people who don't like Frank Capra, so I should add that this is a rough discipline for someone like me. I have a 24-hour email rule to keep me from immortalizing my first responses to what I consider to be bad behavior. My teeth are probably measurably shorter than they should be, from gritting them to keep from saying something snarky. Like you, I am fed up with numerous aspects of daily life, most of them having to do with uncaring corporations or institutions. I despise bumper stickers that instruct me on how to be a better person.

But that may make my endorsement of the gentle exchange all the more meaningful. A naturally beatific person doesn't have the credibility of someone who has to strive to reach out. I could have walked by the cops without so much as a nod - and then I never would have realized what happy mothers day really is.

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