People, grab your crackers, it’s about to get cheesy.
You’re about to read some heavy stuff. Like, grab a wheelbarrow with those cheese and crackers kind of heavy. Not to build it up too much, but if you understand what I’m about to put out into the world, then God bless you. If you don’t then pull up a chair, get nice and slightly uncomfortable, and indulge me while I walk you through the difference between a mother and a mum. (Yes, American peasants, that’s how you spell it, calm your undying patriotism.)
So basically, there are currently, at this moment, according to the slightly sketchy website I checked, 7,504,412,664 people on this earth. 233,829 of which who were born today. And we were all born, on a day, and we call that a birthday. We come from inside this other person’s body, and for some reason, our birthdays are a celebration of the miracle and not the miracle worker? Jesus gets a whole religion based on him, and all he did was split some bread, turned water to wine and tell people they were forgiven and how they didn’t have to sacrifice goats anymore. For the majority, your mum, the miracle worker, doesn’t just ‘split’ some bread… she gives you everything you need to survive, she loves you without any limit or condition, and she has made sacrifices for you which would beyond surpass those of Jesus on the cross in her eyes.
Okay, I’ll stop with the Jesus motif, don’t come after me with pitchforks or anything okay? I’m just saying, our mums give us their entire lives and they get one day a year in return. I present; Mother’s Day my dudes.
I’d like to firstly make the point that we are living in a somewhat progressive age where the circumstances which one is born in is becoming less and less important as to how their life plays out. Gender roles and the typical family structure are so much less on a pedestal, which I think is good for two reasons.
“Just wait until you get out in the big, wide world. What will you do then?”
The first being that no matter how well any family or indeed, an individual person maintains an outward appearance of being perfectly a-grade awesome all the time, things are always uglier up close. We are well on the way to finding value in the cold, hard truth of things. You know how your parents always told you something like “Just wait until you get out in the big, wide world. What will you do then?” well, honestly, you’ve always been in this big, ‘terrible’ wide world. It only shocks you to see the truth of it because you were sheltered from it, not because it’s really that scary. The way we’re going, with the freedom of conversation (about gender, sexuality or birth methods) this shock soon won’t exist. The second you are made aware of the very real stuff that goes on within families; or in the absence of one, you see everything else in contrast.
If some bratty little kid were aware of the consequences of all the bad stuff, then maybe this kid wouldn’t grow up a brat. Maybe they’d grow up seeing the bigger picture, not fixated on trivial matters, making the right decisions and having a hell pound more empathy for people in real situations. Remember when you wouldn’t eat your dinner because it was ‘yucky’ and your mum would tell you about the kids starving in Africa, and how you should be grateful to have anything at all, same thing. If you have no perspective, no starving African kid to compare yourself to, then you grow up selfish and naïve until something happens directly to you, and you have some sort of painful wake-up call. The world isn’t rainbows and butterflies. It shouldn’t be. Maybe if we didn’t decide to shelter kids as much, then other children wouldn’t end up in these bad situations, because their parents knew the consequences. Maybe there would be more decent people who̵
