Whether you call yours mom, mother, mommy, mama, we all have one. And if you are really lucky, yours is still alive and part of your life.
There are lots of sayings about moms.
- “A mother is your first friend, your best friend, your forever friend.” —Unknown
- “Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes
- “Motherhood is the exquisite inconvenience of being another person’s everything.” —Unknown
- “Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary – it’s an act of infinite optimism.” —Gilda Radner
- “My mother is a walking miracle.” —Leonardo DiCaprio
- “A mother understands what a child does not say.” —Jewish proverb
- “Mother: the most beautiful word on the lips of mankind.” —Kahlil Gibran
- “All that I am, or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.” —Abraham Lincoln
- “Mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” —Emily Dickinson
- “A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.” —Victor Hugo
- “God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.” —Rudyard Kipling
- “If evolution really works, how come mothers have only two hands?” —Milton Berle
I miss mine. She died a decade ago. In the few lucid moments we shared during her 14 years of dementia, her questions were motherly. Was I happy? Was I financially secure? Was I healthy?
We officially celebrate mothers once a year in May. I think of mine every day. But are you aware that women use more long-term care services than men?
Moms, wives, daughters and daughters-in-law are our primary caregivers until they can’t any longer. Women earn less, interrupt careers to have kids, quit jobs to care for parents. And as a result many have less financial security in retirement.
Here’s a gift idea. Buy your mom a long-term care insurance policy. Celebrate this gift on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, her birthday, your birthday, Christmas/Hannukah and every other day your family celebrates. She will know you care and you will know that the care she may need will be available.