Like fingerprints or snowflakes, everyone has a different memory of who their mom is or was. It matters not what the subject of the dinner party is, when it gets around to mothers, everyone has a “mom story.”

This last year, perhaps due to COVID covering up the faces of the people, it has in turn uncovered the faces of struggling mothers. Those who were challenged to make ends meet while everything was “normal,” much less during a time when people were quarantined, families were sick, jobs were lost and prices have gone through the roof.

You see it in the weary faces of those mothers with multiple kids in the food pantry lines. You notice it when a mother with children quietly reprimands her children at the gas station, explaining to them that they cannot afford the price of a candy bar and then tells the attendant that she wants $3 on pump four.

We’ve heard the stories of mothers scouring the couch cushions for an errant quarter or pants pockets where there are hopes to find some change from better days gone by. For the most part, these aren’t the mothers that are typically shown in the Hallmark commercials.

The communities are doing all that they can in cooperation with food banks and pantries and thank God for this assistance, but for some mothers, a box of food is a Band-Aid for the needs of a growing family. Hallmark doesn’t show the women who are showing strong on the outside but cry themselves to sleeplessness at night because there seems to be no solution.

The headline from one of the major news sources read this past week, “Another $1,400 stimulus payment will take the country out of poverty.” Somewhere a hurting mother cracks a smirk and shakes her head.

There was a mother way back in the ‘70s who went through something similar. It is a nontraditional mom story. The woman worked two jobs, she kept the house as clean as a spec home, she was raising four kids in a middle-class suburb on a poverty income. She never complained. She was never too tired to go to work. She had supper either on the table or waiting for her husband to warm it up for the kids when he got home.

It wasn’t a weekend adventure. It was her life. And always with a smile on her face. And one year on Mother’s Day, she got homemade cards and flowers and candy, and she made it seem as if her family had given her a trip to Disney.

She earned her cards and went back to her life, quietly about her business with her nose to the grindstone. And part of taking people for granted is not taking the time to see what is going on inside of them. Nobody realized that she had been pushed too far until they found her one warm summer afternoon down by the Menomonee River. She had found a land of barbiturates and they almost persuaded her to stay.

She recovered and found the help she was needing. She had a friend adopt her and her family. That friend was, most are convinced, a guardian angel. It’s to all moms, really that kudos go forward because that job is one that can’t be comprehended unless you have walked in her shoes. 

But for moms like this, that are fighting the battles of life when it feels like all odds are stacked against them, we pray for a Happy Mother’s Day and perhaps the gift of a friend this year. Someone who will listen. Someone who takes action. Someone who has been in the “mothering crucible” and has been forged in the fire.

And to my own mother who passed on in 2015. I am glad you found your way back from the river that day when I was just a child. And for all the times I wouldn’t see or didn’t comprehend or couldn’t understand your journey, I want to tell you now, you were the best and I am grateful because you never quit.