8th December, 2024
People, grab your crackers, it’s about to get cheesy.
You’re about to read some heavy stuff. Like, grab a wheelbarrow with those cheese and crackers kind of heavy. Not to build it up too much, but if you understand what I’m about to put out into the world, then God bless you. If you don’t then pull up a chair, get nice and slightly uncomfortable, and indulge me while I walk you through the difference between a mother and a mum. (Yes, American peasants, that’s how you spell it, calm your undying patriotism.)
So basically, there are currently, at this moment, according to the slightly sketchy website I checked, 7,504,412,664 people on this earth. 233,829 of which who were born today. And we were all born, on a day, and we call that a birthday. We come from inside this other person’s body, and for some reason, our birthdays are a celebration of the miracle and not the miracle worker? Jesus gets a whole religion based on him, and all he did was split some bread, turned water to wine and tell people they were forgiven and how they didn’t have to sacrifice goats anymore. For the majority, your mum, the miracle worker, doesn’t just ‘split’ some bread… she gives you everything you need to survive, she loves you without any limit or condition, and she has made sacrifices for you which would beyond surpass those of Jesus on the cross in her eyes.
Okay, I’ll stop with the Jesus motif, don’t come after me with pitchforks or anything okay? I’m just saying, our mums give us their entire lives and they get one day a year in return. I present; Mother’s Day my dudes.
I’d like to firstly make the point that we are living in a somewhat progressive age where the circumstances which one is born in is becoming less and less important as to how their life plays out. Gender roles and the typical family structure are so much less on a pedestal, which I think is good for two reasons.
The first being that no matter how well any family or indeed, an individual person maintains an outward appearance of being perfectly a-grade awesome all the time, things are always uglier up close. We are well on the way to finding value in the cold, hard truth of things. You know how your parents always told you something like “Just wait until you get out in the big, wide world. What will you do then?” well, honestly, you’ve always been in this big, ‘terrible’ wide world. It only shocks you to see the truth of it because you were sheltered from it, not because it’s really that scary. The way we’re going, with the freedom of conversation (about gender, sexuality or birth methods) this shock soon won’t exist. The second you are made aware of the very real stuff that goes on within families; or in the absence of one, you see everything else in contrast.
If some bratty little kid were aware of the consequences of all the bad stuff, then maybe this kid wouldn’t grow up a brat. Maybe they’d grow up seeing the bigger picture, not fixated on trivial matters, making the right decisions and having a hell pound more empathy for people in real situations. Remember when you wouldn’t eat your dinner because it was ‘yucky’ and your mum would tell you about the kids starving in Africa, and how you should be grateful to have anything at all, same thing. If you have no perspective, no starving African kid to compare yourself to, then you grow up selfish and naïve until something happens directly to you, and you have some sort of painful wake-up call. The world isn’t rainbows and butterflies. It shouldn’t be. Maybe if we didn’t decide to shelter kids as much, then other children wouldn’t end up in these bad situations, because their parents knew the consequences. Maybe there would be more decent people who’d actually do something to help if they knew how real those situations are.
The second is that this flexibility of the family structure puts emphasis less on the whole ‘To be happy, you need a perfect family and a perfect life’ and just the notion that there is only one way to be happy and that only that happiness is what we people need. Nah, as human beings, we need one thing, and as cheesy as it sounds, its love.
Guys, here’s where it gets personal.
No-one and I mean no-one, is without love. Our problem is that love comes in so many forms, and comes through in so many ways, and they clash. A mother is someone who gives birth to a child. That in itself must take an immense amount of love, how else do you get the strength to carry another human being for 9 months of your life? Then do it all again when you want another child? The love has to be worth it. I don’t doubt that it would be really hard to not love that child with everything you have. But there are stronger loves, and some people are too weak to resist what they think will bring them that. As I said, everyone needs love, but some people don’t get enough or the right kind, and then I guess it just ends up as a constant craving. Unfortunately, the parents I was born to found this ‘love’ they craved in drugs.
I can’t say much on the part of my mother because I was quite young when my siblings and I were separated from her. But my father, in times where he didn’t see the love he needed in his life, placed drugs on his list of priorities as first. When he had love in his life, in the form of a family; my ‘step-mum’ (although she is so much more than that) and my siblings and I, he gave love where he saw love was due. Eventually, this love that would’ve saved him clashed with the drugs and the alcohol and he found that the bad was all he was left with. Meanwhile, love found me and saved me when my Uncle and Aunty and their family took me in. The kind of love and strength they showed makes them my parents. That love is so strong that the idea that I’m supposed to be in any other family is completely foreign to me. That right there is the difference between a mother and a mum.
All that above just proves my point. My siblings and I learned to be that much more grateful for the love we receive, and we are capable of giving that much more because we’ve experienced first hand what happens without it. They are proof to me that you can find love no matter how bad your life gets, and that it will pull you through, time and time again if you let it. You’ll learn to return the favour. We are better people when we acknowledge the ugly truth and can adjust our priorities accordingly. The perspective means I know better where my own place in the world is, and indeed, as human beings, to know our purpose and place in the world is the big question right?
As I said, the answer is love.
No matter where it comes from or how it manifests. Regardless of whether you get it from the person who gave birth to you, or who shares your blood, who made room for you in their home and hearts, whoever viewed you as more important than that typical family structure, or if you get it from some random who just met you and thought “hey, she seems nice”, or sure enough, if your love comes from within yourself. Wherever you get it from, or how you take it on, or what you make from it is entirely up to you. But the fact that all human beings have and need love is set in stone.
So what I’m trying to get at is that when I ask “Can anyone can be a Mother?”, the answer is yes, a million times over. I’m not saying it’s always easy, or fun, but it’s necessary. It’s necessary to understand that pushing a baby out of your hoo-ha doesn’t make you a mum. It’s that honest-to-god special love that makes you a mum. Some people don’t have and/or make the choice to be a mother, but literally, everyone on this earth has the responsibility to show love for people. It’s a whole other ballpark that some people hold that responsibility so dearly that they have a responsibility to love those outside their direct bloodline. I’m acutely aware in the fact that I have very little idea what I’m talking about. Obviously, I’m not a mother, and how many times have we all heard the “You’ll understand when you have your own kids.”… and I guess I will. But for now, this is my understanding.