Working moms, single moms, stay-at-home moms — they have a day named after them for a reason. They are the backbone of the world, and in these United States, they are the universal grounding wire and the ultimate lynchpin to life and love American-style. Some are great, others amazing; most are loving and some, quite frankly, probably should never have been — but that is how it is, has been and always will be.
Planned or unplanned and for whatever reason, they chose LIFE and all the wonderful and complicated things that come with it.The highest highs, the lowest lows and the constant drumbeat of worry that is omnipresent and intertwined in the millions of years of deep-seated love that only a bearer of children can ever know. The future of every society is theirs to manage and mold and with it, the rise and fall of empires and the way of the world.
There is no set formula for success, yet there are plenty of do’s and don’ts. One thing is certain: they are a different breed, and not one to be messed with… as some less than honest folks from the left have chosen to do recently. No doubt, this was a trial balloon for the coming election rhetoric but, I think, the verdict is in. Mama ain’t gonna get thrown off the train!
Rich versus poor; non-taxpayers versus the only taxpayers; secular government edicts versus religious choice; race card after race card after race card; and, of course, bratty, grubby, occupiers versus brave, hard working liberators. The beat goes on for a desperate party and a hapless administration in a complete and utter free fall. Or, as the Janis Joplin song says, “when you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose”.
So now it’s the attempt to divide the women — those who work away from home from those who work in the home. Attacking and dividing hard working moms of every discipline for the sake of a vote. Is that really what it has to come to? I cannot believe it, and I surely do not want to imagine how low it could go from here.
My Mom passed over twenty years ago last February and, as that unfortunate anniversary passed, my heart broke just a little more. The saddest day in all of our family’s life was when we got the call on Super Bowl Sunday, 1992. While cleaning up in the kitchen afterwards, she collapsed from a stroke. A coma, a few weeks in an impersonal, sterile hospital and then she was gone. We buried her on Valentine’s Day, on a mild, gray winter morning in a cemetery called Hollywood. How appropriate that was, because she was “The Star” of our lives and her influence and impact on us continues to be immeasurable.
She gave five of us life, was a devoted wife and never asked for anything in return. A beautiful girl, raised in a most difficult time and forever committed to the simple truths. The most important thing to her was her God and her family, and her mission was to give back to this country more than it had given to her. She did that by sending forth a committed and dedicated brood who would love and defend and participate in this great, fragile experiment.
Doris was a depression-era girl from Baltimore who came from a dysfunctional family. That unbalanced but fascinating upbringing molded her into a determined and complex doll who was made more whole and focused when she partnered with my father, whom she had met in Norfolk. The final piece of her determined destiny was bearing five children, of which I was number four, born on Christmas Day in the year of Mantle’s Triple Crown.
The depression era girls — she was proud to be among them — were different and, for the most part, they were the greatest part of the greatest generation. During their formative years, they watched families and communities torn apart by the unprecedented economic collapse and the attending loss of hope and desperation. They had nothing yet everything, and it was that strange elixir that made them like no other generation before or since.
Then, just as they came of age to love and marry, it was all ripped away, yet again, in the form of a second and horrible world-wide war. Their lovers, husbands, friends, brothers, cousins and uncles were taken from them and shipped far away from the cozy hardscrabble neighborhoods where entire families were born, raised and departed. Now, with the depression finally coming to an end, their men left and they had to find a way to make their way in a society made up of heartbroken girls, women, wives and mothers.
When it was over, many of the men, so dear and so young, did not return, while others returned different or damaged. Every neighborhood in America had gaping holes in them which would never heal. So, these millions of girls would make sure these men and their families did not wallow in the pain and loss the war had brought to their doorstep. Their goal was to celebrate the achievements of such monumental sacrifice — the preservation of liberty.
So they went on their mission to patch the wounds and replant and repay society with the best they could bring forth. These incredible young girls vowed that life would go on, and that they would bear and guide a generation that would never suffer or live in the uncertain and unimaginable times they had endured in their most formative years. The result was a time of beauty and simple, perfect accomplishment that created the massive volume of boomer babies who overflowed schools and churches and promised to always keep America great.
These beautiful, determined girls-turned-women had one thing in common: they wanted to raise their children and be there for each and every part of those incredible, fleeting moments. The feminist myth is that there were no jobs for women and they were expected to stay at home and stand by their man. However, the fact of the matter was that America was exploding with work, because the competition lay in waste. America was now the undisputed, heavy-weight champion of the world, and we ruled as its manufacturing, sales, innovation, investment, farming and mineral empire. The jobs were aplenty.
But these golden girls, who had hardship branded on their DNA, did not rush to participate though the market beckoned. Quite the contrary; in large part they stayed away, and they did so through free choice and for the most honorable reason of all. They wanted stability for the first time in their lives, and they knew better than anyone that you could never buy back those lost years and the souls they had claimed. The family was more important than the almighty dollar and all the wonderful things it could buy.
To these trailblazers, the family unit, the raising of good and contributing citizens, the doing more with less was considered the most extraordinary and honorable gift a woman could give. Their families benefited from it, the community would thrive because of it, and the nation would grow stronger as a result of it. Even more importantly, these girls, who had their hearts broken a hundred times in what should have been their most carefree days, knew that the opportunity to raise a family would pass this way only once and they were not going to miss a moment, not for all the tea in China.
The label “stay at home Mom” was not the term of art during these most glorious times. It was a label schemed later by an early, awkward, defeminizing movement. A term and an agenda ginned-up by bored little girls and teachers of the elite all-girl colleges of the Northeast. The product of the privileged “Seven Sisters” who provided the feminist kool-aid and much needed wedge to drive into the most stable, highly functional institution. But such has always been the plan: break down the prime institutions, especially this most important one of all, motherhood. If they could back that screw out of that celebrated and happy model, perhaps it might all start crumbling down, and so it did. They spun a web with the trappings of the good life and many of the young, spoiled daughters of the depression era girls unwittingly strolled right into it. The seed was planted, the core would rot slowly and cause the slow bleed of a once-stable society. Divorce rates exploded, public education imploded, homes went fatherless, and faith floundered while the children’s fates were farmed out to nannys and smelly daily “no care” centers.
Make no mistake, the feminists of the first, second, and now third generation could not hold a candle to the generation that raised them. But what pleasure they took, and still take, in demonizing the best they ever knew. The movement has selectively, over time, chosen to turn against science and nature, to defile marriage and motherhood and the most honorable virtue of all — child bearing and child raising. All the while brainwashing a generation with the tried and true programming of a fringe cult. How dare these stay-at-home women choose to give up personal achievement and all the glorious things that come with it? You can have it all now, so why would anyone of sound mind choose to do what they see as the uninteresting, unimportant, unimpactful…”un-profession” of staying at home not alone.
Thank God, these girls of my mom’s glorious generation, whose short-lived youth lacked so much stability, had learned the hardest lesson long ago. Life and lifestyle can be fleeting, and it is the masterpiece of family they sought to create on their canvas of life. A picket fence, a family portrait, a newborn child and a man in full were all the reward they would ever need, and they thanked God everyday for the incredibly normal life that they had never known, and for the chance to turn away from self importance and professional progress and all the glorious gain that “the good life” might provide for a simple truth and the ageless glory of living a loving life for something greater than themselves.
That dedication has impacted many of us along the way. Although it would have been easier for many of our partners in life to run off and bring home the ample bacon, many of these modern girls who came from that loving stock chose the same. The obvious importance of participating in the passing maternal moment is a wisdom of the ages that has bloomed on the tree of life since the beginning of time. It is an unbroken gift that cannot be substituted for or duplicated in any way, shape or form.
So it is strange and unfortunate to still find a harsh debate raging as part of the left’s fifty-year assault on the woman, the child and the family unit . Like almost all of their hair-brained initiatives, the left can be relied upon to do the stupid, the lazy and the most destructive thing for all the wrong reasons. In their rush to feel good about their lives of privilege, they, in turn, gave away all the things we, as a society, agreed to use as motivation for achievement. The lost tribe of the left has had much success in breaking apart all that is proven to be good and true, and we are all to blame in our weak response to such diabolically dumb undertakings. The left denies and defies all that has made us great, and they relish the chance to ruin quickly that which has taken so long to build up. But such is the goal of the grubby “occupy” mindset that mirrors the left’s point of view perfectly. The “I want mine now” takers have no place and can gain no quarter in the decent and civil society within which a family, community and nation thrives.
So far have we drifted off course since those ladies of no luxury ruled over the family roost. How sad it is to watch the greatest society coming unglued at the seams as a result of the horrible ideas of an elite few. Sadly it is we, the spoiled benefactors of the most dedicated Moms, who have not fought the good fight and let the very ones who loathed them win out. The reality is: we sat idly by as the left insidiously, over time, infiltrated and broke apart the great, sturdy institutions that kept the individual on a collective mission. The new-fangled outcome gives us empty churches, broken schools, decimated cities and now massive debt and unemployment that leads to social mayhem. In the midst of those fantastic outcomes of which they are so proud, the most precious, perfect gift of all — a loving mother and her child — are to be targeted and exploited for political gain.
How sad my Mom would find this unfortunate and ugly place we are quickly becoming. It would break her heart to hear those who have been given so much put down those who have sacrificed so greatly. A world turned upside down; a compass with no bearing; a ship, rudderless and adrift in a sea of uncertainty.
The idea that a profession for women was the most important and cherished thing of a feminist society was a shock to my Mom’s generation. They loved the concept of more opportunity and equal offerings, but the girls who grew up in a time of no hope and no jobs knew, inherently, what the most important thing in life was, and that was the most critical job . . . at home. It was not a part-time gig and there was no financial reward to be gained, but they flocked to it in droves, wearing pearls along the way. You see, the “successful women” who place little or no value on the most honored tradition of all time could not hold a candle to these greatest gals. The feminists think they are a tough lot for sure but, trust me, they could never go one round, toe-to-toe, with these girls who rose from the ashes of our nation’s most difficult times.These women had taken the best blows the world could throw and emerged proud, focused and pound for pound as good or better than any that had come before or since. Today and into the future the shadow of those girls of the greatest generation looms large and casts itself over anyone or anything the feminists could ever conjure.
The left’s long and unfortunate war on women will not be complete until there is government-sponsored housing, healthcare, daycare and a jobs fair in every town square. That is the consequence for a society that says it values people but places bets on systems, that invests in hapless institutions at the expense of the greatest institution ever, and that mocks traditional tried and true values to experiment in passing fancies and fly-by-night trends.What fools to disrespect the accomplishment of the ages for an experimental model, when the fact is that women really never had anything to prove or improve on. Like Doris and her kind, they were the best we ever had, and that is a model that needs no tinkering.
Some women have to work. Others choose to work, and still a good many choose to work at home on the thing they feel is a highest calling. There is no perfect model or solution anymore, but there certainly should be no quarrel with a commitment and a gift that is ageless. Someday, as history provides the more historical context of their amazing contribution, there will be a monument built to stay-at-home Moms of that great generation. Nobody has an upper hand on their time-honored devotion, and maybe the dirty little secret is that you really can have it all without having to be all things. Maybe trying to raise a family and support a lifestyle and have professional success and all that goes with it is not the Holy Grail. Maybe, just maybe, it is more than OK to have a CHOICE and to have babies and to commit everything to their well-being, while relishing the moment. Maybe society will someday return to the view that our offspring and their civil responsibilities are our greatest investment, achievement, and contribution.
What a world that would be in which the family, again, is really the top priority, and the government would recognize, reward and get out of the way of such selfless commitment. And to think, we had it all right in our grasps not so very long ago. Delivered in loving color, on a silver platter, by the damaged young ladies who roared out of the rubble of war and showed us very clearly that the beautiful brass ring was always right within our reach.
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