Maternal Thoughts

Today and yesterday we enjoyed some good, all-natural pumpernickel bread made with coffee and cocoa, a gift from my mother. Freshly baked hearth bread makes life seem happier. The more Mothers' Days I earn as a mother, the more I think that mothers never stop giving and never stop working for their children, and that the idea of Mothers Day being a day to appreciate our moms is an oxymoron. Not that there's anything wrong with that. She took a big group of us out to la trattoria for dinner. It was a good day for moms.
Last week a 10-year-old reported to me that she's living in a tent with her father in a park nearby. My mind has been swirling with the implications of such a lifestyle since then. The latest word is that she is spending the next week and a half in Disneyworld. I guess life can't be all that bad, then ... except that she lost her mother to a fatal heart attack not too long ago.
One day I'd like to find out how my grandmother's mother died. All I know is that she died when my grandmother was 10, in the year 1916, and an "Aunt Clara" was there to help take care of her after that. Back then, any lady friend of the family was designated as an "aunt," so I don't know if she was actually an aunt. My grandmother was placed three years later into an all-girls boarding school in Peekskill, where she lived and learned until she was 18. My impression of life with single dads back then (coincidentally around the time of the very first Mother's Day, in the year 1908) meant one of two things: (1) new mother figure, or (2) boarding school. Fortunately for most, child-rearing is no longer the great unknown to man.