I can’t help but wonder how folks who have less than wonderful parents react to this. Should there be any consideration for people who cringe at the mother’s day and father’s day festivities. People, for whom the only celebratory feelings they have, is that they survived their childhoods. For the children who didn’t survive their parent’s less than loving care, we can’t know how they feel about it.

I have held the belief that just because a woman gives birth it does not automatically entitle her to veneration for so long I can’t recall when I formed it. We are long past the time when producing a child was a matter of great mystery and awe. We know how it happens. We know where we come from. There’s no mystery, no magic or exceptional skill, knowledge or talent needed to get pregnant, and most of the time, to give birth. So what’s the big deal? Why are the creatures who do this very natural thing held in such esteem?

Many hold to the theory that no matter how a woman feels about pregnancy once the child is born they will automatically love it. It’s just a theory. It is not true. It is said that it’s the hormones that make a woman love and want to protect her child. I have to suppose then that some women lack these particular hormones. And what about fathers? They don’t have the hormone theory going for them so what is it for men – chest-thumping ego?

We learn how to be parents from our parents, and often we learn how NOT to be parents, turning a negative into a positive. And some of us recognize that being a parent is not something they want to be; that there isn’t enough positive in the world to affect the negative. That we are such damaged goods we can never risk passing on what we learned.

Everyone is raised by someone, humans being such fragile creatures and taking such a long time to reach self-sufficiency. That someone, or ones, may be loving, or not. When not, often there is some other someone who nurtures and loves and protects, as well as they can protect. That other someone doesn’t get a day.

Perhaps mother’s day and father’s day should be scrapped and a “Nurturer’s Day” should replace it. It’s a thought. Someone call Hallmark.

In the interest of full disclosure I should tell you I received a beautiful basket of goodies and a card as a Mother’s Day gift – It was from my brother.