[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 78 (Friday, May 11, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6010-S6011]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                            HONORING MOTHERS

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, Sunday, May 13, is Mother's Day. Motherhood 
and May are a perfect pairing of all that is warm and nurturing. The 
earth is soft and green, with the buds of new leaves and new life 
appearing everywhere. Birds fill the air with their love songs and 
flowers scent the breezes with their soft perfumes. All around us, if 
we but look, we see the signs of happy motherhood, from the ducklings 
in a neat line behind their mother on a pond to calves curled up asleep 
by their mother's feet in deep green pastures. In neighborhood parks, 
mothers bring their toddlers out to play in the sunshine before their 
afternoon naps or push sleeping newborns in strollers along shade-
dappled paths. In the springtime, the great cycle of life is at its 
fullest flow.
  On this one lovely spring Sunday, the Nation heeds the Biblical 
admonition to ``honor thy mother.'' It is an opportunity to make up for 
those times all year that we may have overlooked our own mother's 
contributions to our well-being, or snapped at her well-meaning advice 
and loving attempts to straighten our collars and smooth our hair. Such 
is the lot of mothers--to be essential but so often unappreciated. 
Mothers are like water--without a mother, life could not exist, while 
not enough mothering can stunt growth like a plant in a desert, but too 
much mothering can be as smothering as floodwaters on a field of corn.
  Motherhood is a delicate high-wire act, balancing love and 
discipline, care and independence, attention and self-reliance. It is 
time consuming, often stressful, unpaid, and with no promotion and 
little recognition. It is a Sisyphean task. Yet mothers persevere, 
rising each day to begin anew, building families with every meal they 
prepare, every schedule they coordinate, every book they read with 
their children, every dirty sock they collect and transform into clean 
and folded laundry. It takes strong women to do it well and to keep up 
the effort over the many years of childrearing, for this is not a job 
that one can hand in a resignation letter or shop around a resume to 
find a better position. It is a job that is truly what a mother makes 
of it, for good or for ill. ``The hand that rocks the cradle is the 
hand that rules the world,'' observed W.R. Wallace.
  Many great men have noted the influence of their mothers. George 
Washington wrote that ``All I am I owe to my mother.'' Abraham Lincoln 
said that ``I remember my mother's prayers and they have always 
followed me. They have clung to me all my life.'' Booker T. Washington 
said that ``. . . If I have done anything in my life worth attention, I 
feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.'' Andrew 
Jackson observed that ``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.'' Their mothers' hands surely influenced 
the world through their mothering.
  Most mothers will tell you that childrearing does not end after their 
children are officially grown up, either. Mothers remain a constant in 
the lives of their offspring for years afterward, sometimes actively 
involved and sometimes waiting in the background in case they are 
needed. The strains of sustaining the military deployments in Iraq and 
Afghanistan have resulted in many more military families calling upon 
grandmothers and grandfathers to raise their grandchildren while their 
military parents are deployed overseas for long periods. Strong 
families and loving mothers make this possible, if not desirable.
  Often mothers with children also find themselves taking up a new and

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unnamed role as mother to their own mother as she ages. Single women, 
too, can become mothers in this way, picking up more and more of the 
care of their aging parents. The willingness and love with which 
children care for their parents is a direct reflection of how good a 
job their parents did raising them. The writer Charlotte Gray observed 
that ``Children and mothers never truly part--bound in the beating of 
each other's heart.'' It is just that sometimes, the roles of mother 
and child, caretaker and care-receiver, reverse. And while it can be 
sad to see one's mother failing, the burden of her care is lightened by 
the warm memories of all the nights her hands tucked in the bedcovers 
or checked a forehead for fever, and by all the prayers her lips have 
uttered on her child's behalf.
  Mr. President, I close with a poem by an unknown author, entitled 
``Mother's Love'':

                             Mother's Love

     Her love is like an 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 of life
     I find a haven there.

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