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Mothers, and How to Look After Them
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By Alan F. Judge
‘She kisses my boo-boos, she braids my hair. My Mother is beyond compare. We love you mothers everywhere.’
I’m sure you’ll recognise that little quotation made by Agnes who, together with her sisters Margot and Edith, was adopted by Felonious Gru for felonious purposes. Her first attempt was spoken despondently but then, after Lucy Wilde married Gru and becomes their new Mum, with much more liveliness. What do you mean, you never watched Despicable Me? Your education must be sadly lacking.
Anyway, depending on which part of the world in which you are domiciled, Mother’s’ Day has either already loomed back in February (Norway), is looming right now (the fourth Sunday in Lent – us), or is still to loom on any day up until 22 December (Indonesia.) Note the use of the double apostrophe. This is my invention and designed to show that either one mother or several can be celebrated.
When did we first celebrate ‘Mother’s’ Day’ or ‘Mothering Sunday’? Well, Mums were celebrated way back in Ancient Greece and Rome as well as by early Christians when it was also a celebration of the Mother Church and the Virgin Mary, but the modern variant was ‘invented’ by the Americans – who else – and first celebrated in 1908. Anita Jarvis is credited with creating the ‘Mother’s Day International Association’ in the USA. In spite of my own ‘apostrophisation,’ of the word, Jarvis decreed that it should be ‘singular possessive’ so families could honour their own Mums and not everybody else’s. An attempt to institute a ‘Mother-InLaw’s Day’ (the use of the apostrophe here is debatable) was rejected by the US Congress, and quite right too.
Of course, not all Mums were perfect. George Washington’s Mum was, by all accounts, a terrible moaner and, much to George’s disappointment, an admirer of King George III. What about Mary Anne Cotton, who murdered eleven of her thirteen children, her four husbands, two lovers and two others with arsenic, all for insurance money? These are those she is known to have killed, but she may have disposed of others as well before Scotland Yard finally caught up with her. She was hanged on 24 March 1873.
Don’t forget, Gru had a Mum as well, Marlena Gru (alias Julie Andrews) whose conversations normally went along the lines of, ‘eeh’, ‘meh’ or ‘ergh’, but I’m sure she loved sons Felonious and Dru Gru equally as well as all her adoptive grandchildren. So, if you’re lucky enough to still have a Mum, do give her lots of love, cuddles and plenty of choccies, even if all she can say is ‘eeh’, ‘meh’ or ‘ergh’, can’t play the piano and crunches the gears on your car.
Molly Peerless, my mother, 55 Tooting Bec Gardens, 1937
