Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  It is salutary that a day is designated for appreciation of one’s mother, the one that we know best.  Also to reflect upon the meaning of bringing life into the world, and the role of nurturing an innocent, vulnerable human to adulthood.  No need to insist that motherhood is sainthood to recognize the importance of cultivating a complex life to productive adulthood.

I was not raised by my mother.  Most of my growing up memories are of my grandmother who had custody of me.  That is the way it was for reasons that I will not go into here.  My mother made a compromise, a painful decision as far as she was concerned that rendered the most beneficial outcome to all family members, myself included.  As with all compromise, a price is to be paid.

Most of my memories of mom come from the last ten years of her life.  As an adult in my late 50s when I visited her in North Carolina, she intentionally told me the stories of our family heritage.  She related memories of when she grew up in rural North Carolina and of the horror of losing her first husband and her brother in an automobile accident during WWII.

I have the feeling that mom wanted to “make up” for the time that she was unable to spend with me when I was a child.  I learned a lot from her through those stories.  I also learned much about my dad, who had already passed on by that time.  Dad was the love of her life.  They made a life for themselves, a joint alliance to the very end.  I also came to understand how much I am similar to my mother, the traits, the family tendencies that come through her.

In conclusion I offer this haunting tune on the topic of mothering.  The song by Pink Floyd, the writer of the lyric is Roger Waters who was raised by a single mother.

The lyric is a series of questions from a child to a mother.  Does not every child have endless questions for his or her parent?  The first question represents the greatest fear, the ultimate nightmare.  “Do you think ‘they’ will be insane enough to _________ .”  Such a question is always relevant, contemporary, urgent.  If mother were alive, I’d still want to ask her such a question.  I would not seek for an yes or no answer, but for the comfort of knowing that she understands as my mother, the terror of this life, that monster that lives and rises up in my imagination.

The litany of questions continues.  And there is some lyrical commentary on the dark-side of mothering.

Mama’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you
Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing

Perhaps most of a child’s fears come from the mother, not from the father?  I speculate.  I really have no idea.

There are several references to a wall in the lyric lines.  What the wall means, and how it’s built is not clearly explained.  Clearly it is a metaphor.  The final line is a lingering, haunting mention of that wall:

“Mother, did it need to be so high?”

Enjoy the video.