To all the moms who this Sunday will open their glitter-festooned handmade cards written in crayon;
To the maters who will receive flowers and kisses and walk into Sunday brunches arm-in-arm, side-by-side with their smart, beautiful offspring;
The mothers whose babies have gray hairs and stiff joints and call once or twice a year from across the country to wish “Happy Mother’s Day, share a few pleasantries and end the conversation with the promise of a Christmas-time meeting;
To the single moms, the married moms, the working moms and the stay-at-homes whose heads are filled with memories of first steps, first words, first birthdays and first teeth;
And to the moms-to-be whose life will no longer be their own the moment their child is brought into this world and quiet-time and me-time and going to the bathroom uninterrupted become fond memories:
Spare a thought and a moment for Maria Castillo.
Maria’s son died Tuesday.
The 18-years-old Colorado high school senior reportedly rushed a gunman on campus and died a hero.
The boy—because despite what the law says, a male that age is still a boy to his mother—should have been graduating high school this week and, like your kids, marking Mother’s Day on Sunday.
Instead her son is dead.
He joins the hundreds of other children who have died over the years because someone angry and mentally unstable had legal and illegal access to a firearm.
It’s been almost seven years since the tiny, happy boys and girls of Sandy Hook Elementary School were murdered en masse. Presumably Mother’s Day has never been the same for the mothers of those children.
Nor has it been the same for the moms of the victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School whose sons and daughters were killed while in class in 2018. Those lost lives are mourned.
As are the dozens upon dozens of adults who may have been mothers, but were all at some point some mother’s baby, and were gunned down during an outdoor concert in Las Vegas two years ago.
Mother’s Day will also be different for the children of Lori Kaye, a 60-years-old woman who was killed in Poway after a gunman opened fire in a synagogue last month.
In school and in life we are taught this is a nation of laws. But in absence of significant gun reform and changes to law that are opposed by gun lobbyists, we more often than not are reduced to becoming a nation of “thoughts and prayers” as we collectively mourn yet another mass shooting.
So this Sunday, on Mother’s Day, take a moment to share “thoughts and prayers” with the moms whose children have been taken from them because we are incapable of making meaningful changes that will make a true difference. Thoughts and prayers are all we seem to have to offer.
