Mothers' Day

...only a day late!

There’s a site on Instagram - worldmotherstorytelling - that you would do well to visit. If you don’t have Instagram because you haven’t let your granddaughters get their hands on your phone when you were conked out on the couch, you can go the World Mother Storytelling website (worldmotherstorytellingproject.org). Believe me, it’s worth your time.

The World Mother Storytelling Project is the brainchild of Murray Nossel, a high energy South African dude who got it in his head that a missing piece (a soul-saving piece) of the world’s cultural intel lies in the untold stories of the world’s mothers, the one classification of humans with a biological connection to all children.

A world run by fear and muscle might make for a good movie script, but absent a fierce drive to protect the young, which is the essence of feminine devotion, our movie is destined to “Fade Out.”

I was introduced to Murray’s project a few years ago by Doug Safranek, a world-renowned artist and master bagpipe player (both a direct result, I’m sure, of having me as his swimming coach in 1966, when he was ten) who paints the portraits of the storytellers. Go to the site and lock in on the eyes of these magnificent portraits and I’ll guarantee you’ll want to hear their stories.

The Mother project has many tentacles, but the one that interests me most, stretches toward the idea of a child telling the story of a specific time or incident through the eyes of their mother, and the mother in turn telling that same story through the eyes of their child.

No matter your age, you’re always your mother’s child; so I felt compelled to give it a try, and not just because my mother died in 1993, and therefore wouldn’t have the opportunity to get into my head (unless she’s already there; I mean, who knows what happens next?).

I probably knew my mom better than any other human, including my dad, who wasn’t the kind to sit around and talk about life. I knew she had left her diaphragm on the window shelf in the bathroom before my dad went off to bomb the Nazis, because she knew he might never return; was terrified to raise a child alone, but more terrified to have no trace of him should he drop out of the sky from thirty-thousand feet.

I knew her brother Leo had been shot down in the Pacific theater in that same war; was classified “Lost at Sea,” and that my grandparents had received a letter from Uncle Leo - three days after the two Army Air Corps officers walked up the steps to their porch to break the bad news - asking if they would be ashamed of him if he grounded himself for a couple of weeks. He wrote, “I have a bad feeling.”

And I knew my mother believed, rightly, that had God given her parents a “Sophie’s Choice” they’d have chosen Leo.

I also knew my mother had twice my natural writing talent. After my brother and sister and I left home, she wrote us three-page, single-spaced, epic sagas chronicling the comedy and tragedy of the citizens of Cascade, Idaho, population 943; from rumors of the sordid affair between a secretary in the county clerk’s office and the owner of a corner grocery store (with which she had no problem, given her opinion of their spouses), to the election of the new mayor, who, as a high school junior had slept with the football coach’s wife, to the small mountains of road apples left on Main Street by the horses leading the Fourth of July parade...and on and on. A letter in the mailbox from my mother was like receiving a box of 1950’s Kellog’s Frosted Flakes with its to-be-continued serial stories on the back. You got a serial with your cereal.

My mother typed 80 words a minute on a classic manual Underwood typewriter that built biceps in your fingers, and if you looked closely, you might find two spots where she used Wite-out. Her first drafts were nearly perfect!

And yet, like so many women of her time, she would never have been so presumptuous as to believe anything she wrote could possibly be important enough for strangers to read; so all of her writing went into birthday “jingles” for her friends and blockbuster missives to her kids.

There’s a line near the end of Allen Levi’s stunning first novel, Theo of Golden: “Most people die with all their songs still inside them.” I can’t help but think Levi was talking about my mom...and a whole lot of other moms silenced by male bravado throughout the centuries.

Listen. Us humans…we ain’t done yet; as in cooked; finally or finely prepared. When we teach Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” we begin touting speed, strength and adaptability to conditions. Eventually we get to opposing thumbs, weapons and tools, along with the capacity to conceptualize. So far, we’re talking about survival of the most brutal, really, which leads us to Homo sapiens, the only species determined to make the planet fit it, rather than to fit into the planet.

And here we are. We’ve gained dominion over all other life forms, but why stop there? Now we want dominion over each other.

Up to this point, pretty fucking male.

But let’s take a breath; we’re talking about survival of the fittest; the operative word being “survival.“ Mothers are all about survival. It’s what mothering is. Good mothers don’t just love their children, they love children. All children.

So, listen up, guys...we’ve brought it this far (arguably a little too far). It’s time to humbly accept our participation trophies, take a bow, drop to a knee and pass the torch...and let the rest of humanity’s story be told by our mothers.

(If you’re bored out of your gourd and want to read Jewell May’s story as told by her favorite child, leave contact info in the comments or shoot me an email at stotan717@gmail.com)