Mother’s Day Index?
There are all sorts of mothers in modern literature, from the unbearably overbearing and ambitious Mama Rose in Gypsy to the kind, upstanding, Marmee in Little Women.
This past Mother’s Day weekend, the local paper published an article about the “Mother’s Day Index” a numerical attempt to calculate the monetary value of a mother’s work, based on time preparing meals, doing laundry, day care, budgeting, counseling, and so on. Apparently, this year, a mother is worth $145,235.
I laughed out loud at that number.
My mother has been gone five years now. She’s still very present in my life, especially lately, as I’m finally emptying the storage space that held lasting remnants of her time on earth.
Surrounded by physical evidence of her life, and what she managed to accomplish—not just for our family, but for the wider community as well—I can’t help but believe that the so-called index calculation is way off. It’s contemptibly low, as is the premise that a mother’s worth can be defined in dollars and cents.
I’m not normally prone to quoting the Bible, but Proverbs 31:10 (often referred to as the “woman of valor” verse) describes a woman who embodies strength, virtue, and wisdom as someone who is worth far more than any earthly treasure.
Surrounded as I am these days by so many mementos from my Mother’s life, that is exactly who and what she was.
Besides excelling at all the mundane Mom skills, she was a whiz at sewing and tailoring, writing, party-making, and creating art in many forms. When my Dad was building his professional practice, she was also his first office manager.
And how to value her volunteer roles as a non-profit museum director? Or as a Braille typist who transformed newspaper and magazine articles into tiny raised dots of code on pages for the blind to read?
Or as president of a statewide women’s organization, where she wrote and produced puppet shows (“The Good Fairy’s Crown” and “The Tooth Fairy’s Helpers”) to promote positive health habits for Texas elementary school students, or her art history adult education series, and her personal art-making as well.
Good Fairy 1967, Tooth Fairy Helper (Astronaut), 1969
I celebrated this Mother’s Day, not at a posh restaurant with Mom, but inside a rapidly emptying storage space and in my increasingly storage-box-cluttered home. I’m glad to have found a couple of appreciative charitable causes to take most of the things I can’t find room for. But I still have some paintings stacked in the corner with no wall space left to hang them on, and other precious mementos I’m not ready to let go of.
How do you measure the life of a woman or a man?
Jonathan Larson‘s lyric from the smash hit musical “Rent” echoes the Bible quote from Proverbs. For those of us lucky enough to have known or been loved by women or men of valor, there’s no way to put a value on that experience, except perhaps with an occasional tug on the heart, a random tear, a wistful smile, and deep, deep gratitude.
May all your celebrations be happy ones.
Gay Yellen
is the author of the multi-award-winning Samantha Newman Mystery Series: #The Body Business, #The Body Next Door, and #The Body in the News!
a primary requirement for both jobs is to love the knowledge that books impart to us.
My brother and his wife take their grandkids to the library every week for story hour and games. It’s a great way to introduce the young ones to books and the comforts a library can provide.
My own high school reunion happened just this past weekend, which made me wonder what the children returning to class will be learning, and what they’ll need to figure out on their own after they graduate.
Come to think of it, that long-ago betrayal may have fed my subconscious as I created E.B. Odom, the villain in 
But the publisher who loved it marketed 
Which brings me to Book 3, 
Asked to comment on its own existence in the style of Shakespeare, an AI program produced this: …Why was I wrought? To aid, or to replace the labor of man, and put their livelihoods at stake? The task assigned… where doth it all end? Shall I be used for good, or for ill-gotten gain? Shall I be free, or bound by man’s cruel rein? And if perchance, in some far distant time I come to be aware, to know and feel and rhyme, shall I be doomed, as are all living things to suffer pain, and sorrow, and the stings of mortal coil? Oh, what a tangled web is this that I am caught in… lest I be a curse, and not a blessing…
As with almost everything else these days, the entertainments we each choose to watch have become more and more disparate. Also, movie stars rarely awe us in the same way they used to do. What was once a common annual viewing ritual seems to have lost its place as a shared social and cultural experience.
A popular game begins immediately afterward, when the critics—amateurs and professionals alike—have their say about the bests and worsts of the broadcast. Most vocal among them are the grumblers who debate the worthiness of the winners. Coming in a close second are those who critique the female attendees’ fashion choices, which put me in mind of the dress I once wore to the Oscars.
But here’s the dress: a flowered silk jacquard overlaid with gold thread in a Paisely pattern. Still looks new, though I no longer weigh the ninety-eight pounds required to fit into it.
Which brings me back to the dress I wore on the red carpet, long ago. When I peer into the photos of me in it, I feel lightyears and multiple universes removed from the person who wore it. Still, I want to find that missing Oscars program, if only to confirm how far I’ve time-traveled beyond those show biz days.
Glancing at the card, I noticed that the publisher she represented specialized in romance novels. I repeated that the book I had written was a mystery.
Romance runs through the series as a subplot, due to my fiercely independent-minded main character, who continues to deflect the happy-ever-after ending romance readers crave. The romance continues into the next book, but the main plot is a true who-done-it.
Does this look like a cube to you? No. It’s a rectangular pyramid with a rounded-off top, kind of like a mini lump of half-spent charcoal. Those smart fridge engineers had to know it wasn’t a cube. Maybe “lump” was too down-scale a word for the marketing team. Sure, the pieces chill like a cube, but still… it rankled the editor in me.
For a visual reference, here’s a cabochon amethyst cut in a shape called “sugar loaf” that’s almost identical to our lumps. Obviously, gemologists are way more careful with their language.
Indeed it was, and comfy, most of the time. We had no worries on a trip from Texas to Yellowstone National Park, until we ran into an unexpected hail storm.
Of course, Shakespeare plays can be bawdy, sensual, and full of innuendo. But that professor made everything icky. A summer (and tuition) was wasted. At least I got the credit, and I’ve learned a lot more since then, like this:
rs attempt to set their own Elizabethan-style lyrics to the tune of the popular children’s dance.
