To The Women Who Make a House a Home: Happy Mother's Day

In a poignant tribute entitled Something Wonderful, Donald Todd writes of a mother, whom he lost at a young age in life, and a wife who rekindled the sense of home in him.

In our household, my father was the head and my mother the heart — or, if you will, the glue. She held things together because each of us was an extension of her heart.  She was the connection for each and every one of us. Everything ran through mom. She made the home and we got to live in it.

[snip]

So for several decades I did not have a home. I had a place in a house, or in a barracks. I stayed in a monastery, I lived in a dormitory, and shared an apartment with other men. But I did not have a home. In all of my experience, men do not create homes.

Then I married, and my wife, a homemaker, made a home for me. I finally got to come home. ... A woman inhabited my heart, and I became an extension of her heart.

Each time I find myself using the term 'wonderful' I remind myself that it means "full of wonder." 'Homemaker' and 'homemaking' are words that are full of wonder for me in an age that commonly seems to disparage wonderful things.

I think — actually I hope — we are near the end of this era. It is a particularly difficult era for women. Their own kind condemn them by denigrating marriage as a form of slavery or being a housewife as some kind of evil servitude. There's the discourtesy of being called a “domestic engineer,” and of discounting titles such as ‘wife’ and ‘mother,’ while actively discouraging mutual self-donation (married life) and motherhood. Many reasons are given to avoid that particular wonder.

I might be accused of looking for Ozzie and Harriet, but I don’t believe we can go backward to that time. We might, however, go forward to a new time when good family lives are found around the heart of the family: the woman who makes a home.  Now that would be wonderful.

To all the women who make a house a home, Happy Mother's Day.