How much one loves his/her mother and how much she responds to the love and affection she receives from her children is a perpetual debate -endlessly engaging and inconclusive so far.
Mothers' Day each year comes on May 8 with a reminder of the duty children have towards their parents. Taking care and ensuring fulfilment of their physical needs if they are old, is necessary in the first step as age wears out energy to work hard. During illness they need medical care and during recovery from illness they need management of their recovered health.
Those who cease to work and earn wages become dependent upon their children for financial support. Their requirements, though limited, vary from spending on grandchildren to purchasing dentures and hair colour. In between these two expenses falling eyesight is another area of expenditure.
The money saved from these expenses goes to the closet and then into the small safe box where it rests till such time a birthday or any other occasion of happiness of their children or grandchildren is announced. The purchasing of gifts and keeping it secret till the occasion for which the gift is purchased comes is energizing and invigorating for the elder people. As Francis Bacon writes in essays on "Of parents and Children", the joys of parents are secret, and so are their grief and fears.
Among the elders, mothers have got special place whose grief and fear children should care for. Mothers are the symbols of godliness, chastity and love for their children. They bestow their tenderness on their children but at times it transcends the boundaries that blood relations and family bondage draw and reach others as well.
The point to ponder at this stage is what children give to their parents in return. In most of the cases young people consider material support enough for their parents and restrict their activities to procuring food, lodging and boarding and limited financial support for their parents. While doing so they forget the necessity of fulfilment of psychological needs of the elderly people.
The foremost is the companionship and acknowledgment of their existence. Older people are often found complaining about their children who do not find time to sit with them and talk to them. They feel isolated and neglected despite all the worldly needs at their disposal. They do not get the kind of recognition and acknowledgement they long for and feel neglected.
On the Mother Day it would be appropriate for those who love their parents to make a commitment that they would find time for their parents every evening, share their moments of joy and grief, listen to their views on family affairs and acknowledge their existence.
A mother is a mother still
The holiest thing alive. -Coleridge.