It was Wednesday when my mother told me, “It’s not really going to feel like a Mother’s Day this year.”
Of course, a lot of things just won’t feel right this year, for everyone. It’s a year when high school seniors will be enrolling in colleges they cannot visit, and even funerals have to be put off in order to allow social distancing. On Mother’s Day, florists will be relying on online orders, and sons and daughters won’t get to hand-pick those flowery gifts for their mothers. I suspect many families will be replacing Mother’s Day hugs and backyard barbecues with phone calls and Facetime.
I will never know what it’s like to be a mother, but, to me, the importance of Mother’s Day, and celebrating our mothers, isn’t related to home-cooked meals or beautiful bouquets, but about duty. A mother’s duty to her child is part of that term “unconditional love” that is so often used when talking about motherhood. I imagine carrying out that duty can be quite mucky at times — perhaps literally, when it comes to cleaning an infant — but mothers perform the duty nonetheless.
And since it’s Mother’s Day Sunday, and my name is at the top of this piece, I’d like to selfishly mention my mother, Krista McLellan, who is an oncology nurse at Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Peabody. As a truly essential healthcare worker, there is no way to escape going to work and risking infection during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She expressed to me in March that she would go to work unless she were told not to, that the patients needed her care, and that it was her duty as a nurse to provide that care. And since then, she’s gone in happily, to a place where the general public filters through, and where there will always be infectious disease by necessity, including the dreaded coronavirus.
Again, it’s that sense of duty that impresses me, and I can’t help but compare the role of a nurse to that of a mother. Nurses don’t take a break from nursing when things get dangerous, and mothers don’t take a break from parenthood when things get rough. If there’s a global pandemic, you can count on a nurse to be at the hospital ready to administer an IV, or prepare an airway trolley before a patient is to be intubated. And when the principal called home, I could still count on being fed — even if the meal was served with a side of scolding.
I worry about her becoming infected. If she’s worried, I haven’t seen it. But I think the same can be said about mothers, and I’m sure they worry, ponder, and think about their children far more than we ever see or know.
Mother’s Day will definitely be different this year, but motherhood hasn’t changed, and we should all appreciate our mothers’ duties supporting us, just like we should appreciate the duty that nurses and other healthcare professionals are carrying out during a global pandemic.
So, to all mothers, I hope you get a warm message and it still feels like Mother’s Day in a sense. And to my mother, happy Mother’s Day. Love you.
