THE JOURNAL & TOPICS NEWSPAPERS | WEEK OF MAY 4, 2008
Mom: The Backbone of Life
By JOHN CRAWFORD
Next Sunday is Mother's Day, a day on which we honor the one who gave us life, and the husbands and the entire family can thank the person who is the Chief Operating Officer and the Chief Executive Officer (don't tell your father) of the most important unit in our civilization - the family.
Former President Jimmy Carter has honored his mother, Lillian Carter, by writing a book about her - "A Remarkable Mother". I have not written a whole book about my mother, but she is the central figure, with my father, in a family history I wrote about 30 years ago. It makes me feel good to read those chapters from time to time. And all of my mother's grandchildren and descendants to the nth degree will know what a wonderful mother she was, raising six children during the Depression of the 1930s, and being a mother to her four nieces when my aunt died at an early age. Of course, she wasn't the only saint who raised a family during the Depression. The family history also mentions the neighbors and their mothers - my mother's friends. Looking back, I think they were just as heroic as my mother. The Greatest Generation owes a lot to the Mothers of the Greatest Generation. I hope their children have also written down somewhere the stories of their mothers.
Mother's Day is the closest thing we have to a celebration of all women - mothers or not. But we have the opportunity to honor another large group of women, mothers or not, on May 12, the day after Mother's Day this year. May 12 is the birthday of Florence Nightingale, and is the culmination of National Nurses Week, which begins on May 6. We can all remember great women who taught us in school, and women have in the last 50 years taken their place with men in government, law, medicine, business and finance, even in the military. But I think nursing is the closest profession to being a mother.
Lillian Carter, Jimmy Carter's mother, was a registered nurse. I haven't read his book, which was just released on May 2, but I did recently read a book about nurses who served in the Armed Forces during World War II. A few years ago two former Army nurses, veterans of WWII, wrote a book about the Army nurses who were not far behind the battle lines in tending the wounded. They were serving at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines when the war started, and in North Africa, Sicily, Anzio, Italy, France, and in the Pacific as the war progressed. The foreword of their book ("And If I Perish", Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003) points out that "over 350,000 American women volunteered to serve in the armed forces during World War II. More than 59,000 of these women were registered nurses. Sixteen [Army nurses] were killed a s a result of enemy action; more than seventy were held as POWs of the Japanese for more than three years." So we'll remember them as well as the soldiers, sailors, Marines, Airmen and
Coast Guardsmen on Memorial Day.
On Mother's Day we should also remember the young mothers or expectant mothers, single mothers who are in need of help, mothers caring for their elderly mothers as well as their children. We have received appeals for help from charities who care for these mothers, from the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, the Northfield Township Food Pantry and several others. Let's not forget them on Mother's Day.