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Senator Byrd

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May 12, 2006

Happy Mother's Day

Each year for Mother's Day, Senator Byrd takes time to pay tribute to mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers everywhere.

The iris are blooming, their beauty as refined as a Japanese print. Roses are spilling their sweet perfume into the air. A bountiful harvest of sweet, red strawberries is making its way into pies and shortcakes. The phones are busy at florists around the country. The signs are clear that this Sunday, the nation will again observe the annual celebration of Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is beloved by florists, candy-makers, greeting card producers, phone companies, and restaurants, for it is a busy day indeed for them. But the day is also beloved by mothers, for it is on this one day more than any other that they receive full credit for their favorite and most important job. This coming Sunday, mothers will be showered with affection, waited upon, called upon, and honored. And they deserve it.

The Little Things

It is the little things that count
And give a mother pleasure –
The things her children bring to her
Which they so richly treasure…
The picture that is smudged a bit
With tiny fingerprints,
The colored rock, the lightning bugs,
The sticky peppermints;
The ragged, bright bouquet of flowers
A child brings, roots and all –
These things delight a mother’s heart
Although they seem quite small.
A mother can see beauty
In the very smallest thing
For there’s a little bit of heaven
In a small child’s offering.

-- Katherine Nelson Davis

A mother stays with you throughout your life. Her words and her actions resonate. We can hear her voice echoing across time when we repeat to our children the lessons she taught us: “sit up straight,” “use your napkin,” “stop fidgeting and pay attention,” “say thank you,” and “if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?” Every mother molds and shapes her children in ways large and small, from lessons as important as treating others with thoughtfulness and courtesy to tasks as small as how to fold laundry.

Years later, as you teach your own children to fold laundry, you might smile to recall that it was your mother who taught you how to fold a shirt in a particular way. It is also probable that she was teaching you to fold it in the same way her mother had taught her, just as her mother taught her courtesy and she taught you. Those gentle hands carried the ingrained lessons of many generations, lessons honed and reinforced over many generations.

On Mother’s Day, when we honor mothers, we also honor grandmothers and great grandmothers, whether or not we were fortunate enough to have known them in life. “Children and mothers never truly part bound in the beating of each other’s heart.” So wrote Charlotte Gray, and her words speak to the heritable nature of a mother’s love. It passes through the generations like our own DNA.

Mothers also model efficiency. Mothers were the earliest adopters of “multi-tasking,” long before such a phrase had even been coined. Modern appliances make mothers even more efficient, simultaneously washing and drying clothes while cleaning the house, making dinner, keeping up with the news, and monitoring their children’s homework. In today’s busy world, working mothers must master such multi-tasking, and many do it with amazing dexterity, juggling work and family and all of their children’s outside activities with the skill of a circus act. Mothers are also the lifeblood of many activities important to their children, from scouting to athletics, parent-teacher associations to Sunday school, music lessons to swim teams.
The phrase “soccer mom” accurately reflects a wide swath of American culture.

And still mothers find time to nurture, to cuddle, to listen, to heal, and to teach. Henry Ward Beecher observed that “The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.” This is surely true, for with every action, every look, every word, be they soft and loving or briskly authoritative, mothers teach their children.

Their influence upon the world is incalculable. George Washington said, “My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.” Abraham Lincoln said, “I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.” He also said that “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.” Andrew Jackson noted about his mother that “There was never a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness…The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and on that capital I have made my way.” Booker T.
Washington said that “In all my efforts to learn to read, my mother shared fully my ambition and sympathized with me and aided me in every way that she could. If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.”

The leaders of our future are being molded and shaped right now by their mothers. It is hard to imagine that those small faces being wiped clean by their mother’s hand might someday smile at us from the Oval Office, or that those chubby fingers might someday operate dangerous machinery. But that childish confidence is fostered by their mother’s love, urged on by her unwavering support, and raised up by her tender sympathy. Their mothers support will give them the wings to fly high and to achieve great success.

I am sure that these future leaders will someday echo the words of Washington, Lincoln, and Jackson in crediting their mothers for their success. Every child deserves a mother worthy of such sentiments, and as a nation we are fortunate to possess so many wonderful mothers.

I close my tribute to mothers and Mother’s Day with a poem by an unknown author. It is called “Mother’s Love.”

Mother’s Love

Her love is like a island
In life’s ocean, vast and wide;
A peaceful, quiet shelter
From the wind, the rain, the tide.
‘Tis bound on the north by Hope,
By Patience on the West,
By tender counsel on the South,
And on the East by Rest.
Above it like a beacon light
Shine Faith, and Truth, and Prayer;
And thro’ the changing scenes in life
I find a haven there.

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