We frequently hear the saying “Politics is downstream from culture,” but we should consider as well that culture is downstream from the family. The foundation stone for a healthy culture is the family, both the nuclear family and its extensions: grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts. If we wish to see what happens to a culture when these bonds become frayed or broken, we have only to lift our heads and look around us.
And mothers are the heart of this arrangement. (A note to Dads: We’ll be coming back to you on Father’s Day.) Though Anna Jarvis created Mother’s Day in 1908 to pay homage to “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” poets and writers, sons and daughters, have long extolled mothers and motherhood. From the tributes of Marcus Aurelius to his mother to those of other historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, children have shown a deep appreciation for maternal influences, recognizing, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Men are what their mothers made them.”
