Mother's Day: A Redundancy?

 

redundancy - noun - a state of being unnecessary, excessive, or repetitive.

If you live in the real world, a.k.a. material, you are most likely aware of redundancies as they are ubiquitous. Just look around you or just contemplate the universe as you know it. How many examples of unnecessary, excessive, or repetitive nouns (people, places, things, ideas) can you count? Probably more than you would have thought. 

Yet are there days on the American calendar that can be considered redundant? My critics will argue that the Hallmark holidays (Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Father's Day, Grandparents' Day in particular) are unnecessary, excessive, or repetitive because, let's face it, everyone who can personally relate to any of these should celebrate or be celebrated daily. And I can't disagree. As a mother, every day SHOULD be just for me :). 

However, we don't live in a perfect world because of pretty much one thing. Just in case you didn't already notice, there is a HUGE billboard erected on the side of the daily highway, staring the passerby in the face and screaming, "Beware of HUMAN NATURE!" Face it. Because we are fallible humans, more than a tad self-centered, we need reminders to be good to each other, and we only have ten fingers on which to tie string. Any calendar and Hallmark (the greeting card stores) are in place to give us the added impetus to remember those who have embraced us lovingly in the past, present, and/or future. We need to be glad that we can set aside one day out of 365 to honor special people: moms, lovers, dads, grandparents so that the avalanche of attention bestowed for 24 hours will last another 364 days until we can do it all over again. And if we are on the flip side, the persons being extolled, we can relish all of the attention because we know we might have to wait another 364 days to partake of it again. 

For those of you who are unfortunate enough not to be on the giving or receiving end (and there are many), I recommend that you stop thinking about how disappointed or depressed you are since you haven't been chosen for either of the teams and double up on the giving end. Find someone else's mother or father or grandparent who might actually deserve accolades and give them generously. As for Valentine's Day, adopt a less fortunate soul and buy or make him or her a card. Or just do something memorable for that person. Historically, as I am usually paramour-free (bad break-up timing on my part) around February 14th, I concentrate on remembering dear friends or acquaintances. One year way back in 1983, I gave the lonely doorman of my New York apartment building an economy-sized Whitman's Sampler just because I had a feeling that everyone else would ignore him (as was his daily plight as a sentry at the entrance). He was so delighted that he hugged me until I was nearly blue in the face. You would have thought I had given him a check for a million dollars. No doubt, I made his day, and it has been permanently registered in my mind as a favorite recollection of February 14th.

The moral of this personal essay is the following: Any and all opportunities to love should never be filed under the nomenclature of "Life Redundancies."

For all of you moms (real and adopted), I hope you celebrated Mother's Day yesterday in grand scale with smiles on your faces :). 

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