“Today’s Moms need a few old maxims”

By

Gerry Niskern

Today’s young mothers, either working or stay-at-home, strive to achieve unrealistic standards set by today’s society. Many magazines demand that mothers see that their children are involved in sports, music lessons and other enriching experiences every single day. They struggle to meet every need of their children’s entire emotional, psychological and intellectual well being twenty-four seven.

Today’s mothers are encouraged to raise their children to think they are the center of the universe. Heaven forbid that the child is bored or allowed to think for themselves.

I imagine some readers remember complaining as a child about having nothing to do. I think the usual reply back then was, “Find something to do, or I’ll find you something.” Believe me, you didn’t want to know what that was!

My mother would advise today’s mothers to instead, arm themselves with an arsenal of maxims! I was raised by the maxim method, but didn’t realize it until years later.

When l begged to have my long braids cut off and my hair styled, I was informed that “beauty is only skin deep and furthermore, just remember that pretty is as pretty does.”

     On the afternoon my boyfriend and I ditched highschool, she flung open the front door and announced that she was “mad as a wet hen” after the school called and if I thought I had gotten away with it “I had another thought coming. You’ve cooked your own goose and your dad is going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.”

After a Saturday date, as we approached the front yard, the front porch light the size of a lighthouse beam would suddenly blaze on. I just knew she was smugly thinking, “I nipped that in the bud.”

     Certain occasions in our family were command performances. Family holidays, birthdays and especially funerals were required attendance. “What do you mean, you can’t go. Your Uncle John was the salt of the earth. Services are at two o’clock. Be there. After all, blood is thicker than water.”

Long after I became a mother myself, she continued to mother the young women who worked in my parents small manufacturing business. On Monday mornings she brought them samples and copies of a new recipe that melted in your mouth. When she worked along beside them she gave them liberal doses of her views on good morals. She advised them to take the bull by the horns and break it off with boyfriends that were not treating them respectively or were always four sheets to the wind; everybody knows, a leopard can’t change his spots.  Mom arranged a cash advance on her first paycheck if a new girl was having a hard time financially. She simply informed my dad that the poor girl was between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Mom supplied love in abundance, but she also gave us no nonsense replies to self-indulgent complaining. Most of the maxims she used were simply shortcut ways of telling us to stand on our own two feet and think for ourselves. Crocodile tears were not acceptable.

So, as my mother would say to young mothers today, “ Learn a few maxims. Who knows? Maybe someday when your children are adults, they might look back fondly at your method of upbringing and say, “She was worth her weight in gold!”