“There is but one mother” starts the spanish expression “because nobody could bear two of them” Like many others, I have thought about the wisdom of popular expressions like this, more than a few times in my life. I also wonder, every year, who could bear another mother’s day.
A. asked if I was going to write about it. “I went to the flower shop and there is nothing left!” That, in itself, should be more than enough for a dissertation. The Netherlands is, since historical times until today, the bigger player in the international flower industry. Most important producer, crucial trader, relevant consumer, you name it. Also, the dutch are rightfully known by their foresight and logistic organizational skills. But if even I know that in a mother’s day people will want flowers... that flower shops are exhausted is hard to believe. Might this be the result of yet another consumist frenzy unleashed by Covid near end? Everybody NOW! let’s buy floooooweeeeers! and we all go flower mad. And let’s not even think about the thing itself, flowers. Why flowers? Why do we need to grow a plant for a year or more, to actually chop a piece of it, discard the rest and keep it in a table center for few days? Does this not sounds like waste to you? Even cruelty? What does entitle us to steal pieces of nature and put them as trophies to our good taste in our houses? Why could they not stay in their fields, just being flowers? At least the antlers of hunted down deer endure many years, but flowers you have to keep producing. People keep on being concerned about the great deforestation in the Amazon due to farmers. Rightly so. A great deal of former forests are used to produce soya. At least you can eat soya... but those great fields of flowers? those vaste strips of land covered with one plant, endlessly fertilized by all sorts of doubtful suplements, polluted by even more insecticides... there is nothing positive that I can say about the flower industry.
And then, there you have it again. I want to talk about mother’s day, and here I am, ranting against big capitals and their influence in our environmental crisis. For once, let’s try to stay focused, Mother day it is. Actually I think that mother’s day is like the real entity herself, the mother.
As M. phrased few hours ago, texting about the well deserved congratulations I send her, one would prefer some continuos, 365 days a year appreciation, instead of a once in a year visit to bring a bunch of flowers. Perhaps. But also, me now well into my fifties, I am not inclined to think in my mother every other day, so I rather (happily) remember her many virtues once, or twice, a year. Without having to refer to my troubled relation with my family as unique pattern of human relations, I am actually inclined to believe that having anniversaries just like this are a good thing, a sort of clock that we have build into our years to mark rythms and cadences that if don’t make our life easier, are actually a part of it.
I write within view to my garden, and earlier on I spend some time practicing kendo kata in the park aside my house. After a long winter and an undecided spring, it might even be that the summer is preparing herself to show. At least quite some of the trees think so, flexing newborn leaves into the air. There is definitively much more green than a week ago. The days are growing mellow. And so, marked by birthdays and mother’s day and other milestones I go on, moving across the sea of time, making sense of pulsions of which I would barely be aware without a calendar, an artificial solution to remind me that I am part of nature too, with my owns rythms and periodicities.
Belated congratulations to the mothers that read this... and to her sons and daughters too.