¡Feliz Día de las Madres!

Today I salute my mother and mother-in-law, my sister and sisters-in-law, and all my friends who are mamis, all of whom manage to mother (or to have mothered) full-time on top of working for a living.

I've lately realized (and been not a little ashamed of) how it's been rather easy for me to be a back-seat driver, or to evaluate how someone else was doing the hard work of mothering from the comfort of my Monday-morning quarterback position, from the privileged vantage point of someone who didn't actually have to get on the field and play the game to have a quick and ready opinion.

As my younger "twin" Boricua friend (we're so often confused with each other here that it's almost as if we were identical!) says: "Until you've had cracked nipples, and woken up at 3 a.m. with a child burning with fever, or had to rush a child to the hospital on top of everything else you had to do, you shouldn't judge mothers."

I didn't even know you could get cracked nipples! How awful!

And while I don't envy that, I know that they are part of relationships in their life of a kind that I will never have (well, except as a daughter), and that they're defined by a role that I will never know, even if I am a kind of "college mom" to a few of my students, and even if I've "raised" several furry children. It is, of course, just not the same thing at all.

Now that I find myself in the interesting position of having most of my working women friends be mothers, I'm more aware that there is a huge element of ever-present guilt, and that while those of us who are childless might be helpful in terms of giving a mom a different way of appraising a situation, what we are needed most for is support, affection, and understanding.

I hear my friends who are mothers tell their stories and I have come to be more sympathetic to the challenges they face and overcome on a daily basis, and to realize that most mothers do the best they can. My mother did it before them and so did my mother-in-law and my sister and sisters-in-law are, likewise, mothering with all they've got to give, as we speak.

In my own experience, I've had a lioness of a mother who (along with my father) raised me to be a woman warrior. My mother is a woman whose strength and bravery and cheerfulness have often been at odds with the difficulties she has faced in life, ever since she was a child. As I've noted before in these pages, my mother is a force of nature, whose love and loyalty and commitment to her children is unparalleled but who also is not one to mince words, when words need to be said whole. And my mother has been and is a mother every day of her life, something I know is often exhausting (even if also rewarding). My mother is an inspiration to me each and every day of my life, as I know my friends who are mothers are to their sons and daughters.

To all those brave, loving, tired, awed, overwhelmed mothers I know, ¡Feliz Día de las Madres!