“Healthy Living”
by Carl Hendrickson
For the Call

Unassuming.

Unselfish.

Underappreciated!

These words described my mother.  Perhaps they also describe yours, or perhaps they describe you.

It is not until we reach adulthood that we truly appreciate all that our mother has given us or done for us, and how unselfishly she labored to make us the man or woman that we became.

When Erma Bombeck’s now-famous article, “When God Created Mothers,” first appeared in her column in 1974, I was an adult and married to a mother. Yes, I had finally come to appreciate up close the burdens undertaken by a mother to raise a child.

When God created mothers, He was into His sixth day of “overtime.” An angel came to inspect the creation.  The angel bent and ran her fingers across the cheek of the creation.  “There’s a leak,” she pronounced.

God explained that it was not a leak but a tear. When the angel inquired what the tear was for, God said that the tear was for “joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness and pride.”

“You are a genius,” the angel said.  God replied, “I didn’t put it there.”

This column is for my deceased mother, my wife, and all the other mothers who have shed many a tear of joy, of sadness, of disappointment, of pain, of loneliness and of pride.  Thank you. Hopefully your child or children have come to appreciate all that you have done as a mother.

But a mother does more than shed tears for us. She often is the bedrock of the family, providing advice as needed.

My mother, by word and action, showed that the greatest pleasures in life are the friends we accumulate and the memories of the time spent with them. Our friends hang like companion stars around us, giving us direction.

Friends are those relations we chose for ourselves. It is to our friends that we run when we have something to celebrate and fall back upon them when feeling ill-used.

As my mother said, a friend stands by you in prosperity, poverty, health and sickness. When others desert you, a friend remains by your side.

Thank you, Mother, for this priceless lesson in life, for your advice on true friendship, for showing that it is infinite and priceless.

Thank you for the advice to search for friends and not gold or silver.

It is a lesson I have taken to heart.