AMERICAN MOMS - 94 AND COUNTING

America has been celebrating Mothers Day for 94 years now. But my how it's changed....!

Declared in 1914, it's been celebrated ever since by equal parts: Devoted children, guilty children, eager florists and dewy Hallmark stores. However, while a mother is always a mother, motherhood today is no longer one-size-fits-all. It now comes in all different sizes, shapes and saint-hoods.

For me it came straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Apron-wearing, pie-baking, stay-at-home mom who lovingly packed my lunches in the morning, and had cookies and milk waiting when I came home in the afternoon. Today that memory has become an endangered species in America. How, then, should we celebrate this 95th Mothers Day?

Maybe by understanding that endangered doesn't have to mean extinct. Plenty of moms are still putting out cookies and milk. But at that time of day, many others are working second shift at the plant, doing triage at the ER, directing traffic in the loop, or maybe meeting deadlines at the office. Their presence in children's lives today is felt in other ways. Exchanging stories in the van taking the neighborhood kids to school, hosting the weekend tour bus to Lincoln's Home, or just sharing their exhausted end-of-the-day bed with you wrapped inside their arms in front of a television screen.

There are widowed moms, single moms, teenage moms, latchkey moms, and gay moms. They aren't always the way we find them in the Bible or in the classics, but their maternal value is no more meant to be frozen in literary time than our faith is meant to be frozen in church statuary. These are living values, and the only true sign of life in this world is growth.

The lacy, pink patina of the last 94 Mothers Days is something to cherish. But growth is cherish-able too. Growth and change today is America's middle name. During a century of Mothers Days, we've witnessed a doubling of the population, a movement from the farms to the cities, the breakdown of urban family life, an explosion of different signs and sins. Yet running through it all is always the same back story: Moms!

Laud them or lament them, ask your psychiatrist how they molded you or messed you up. The one enduring fact of life -- personal or public -- is that they remain the great indispensables. Nothing happens without them. And when we are at last without them, there's a hole in the soul nothing can ever quite replace.

This coming Mothers Day will be one more chance for some of us to finally get it right....