A job description: “No qualifications or previous experience needed; salary and hours are non-negotiable; no paid benefits; lifelong position.”
Would you be surprised if I told you that two billion people in the world took up this position?
Their job title is “Mother.”
Mother’s give up more than you could sometimes imagine for their jobs. Their waistlines, their sleep, the backseat of their cars, their tidy homes. They would even give up their lives if it came to it. Take the heroic example of one mother who threw herself under the wheels of her unattended SUV that started rolling downhill towards the edge of a cliff, her twin daughters strapped inside. This may come as a shock to you, but many mothers who have heard of this story probably found the extraordinary action completely understandable. Pretty crazy right?
Fortunately, a mother’s job very rarely entails a test of runaway cars. But, the more frequent challenge that can be presented within a mother’s career is watching their children roll into financial troubles, or seeing their child come home upset because someone has been mean to them at school, wanting the best for their child but not quite being able to afford the things that “all the other kids are doing,” and many more countless circumstances. Mothers often carry the role of speed bumps in such cases, by putting their own resources between their children and bad credit or in some cases even joblessness.
So this year, one of the best ways to honour our mums this Mother’s Day is to recognise their willingness to make such sacrifices, but at the same time doing all they can to prevent them occurring in the first place.
“Mother’s love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible.”—Marion C. Garretty
