Mother’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate one of these parental relationships. Father’s Day hosts the second celebration. Both are desperately needed

Mother’s Day: Gender Matters 

BY PIA DE SOLENNI

In his book Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe describes the women at an exclusive party in Manhattan. The first group, starved to near perfection, used fashion to compensate for the natural curves that they had denied their bodies. These were mostly the first wives and “women of a certain age.” Then he describes the “lemon-tarts,” the women who were young, the live-in girlfriends or subsequent wives. But he notes that one type of woman was missing: “[N]o one ever invited … Mother.”

This passage has stuck with me, particularly when I consider how our notions about both motherhood and fatherhood have been diluted.

Frequently, both women and men are valued for their career accomplishments rather than their relationships as spouses and parents. The outsourcing of conception, pregnancy and child rearing also make it more difficult to understand the irreplaceable contributions of a mother or father. When more than 40% of all births are to single mothers, fathers seem to be anything but essential. Divorce, all too commonplace, makes both mothers and fathers seem interchangeable and certainly not unique. All of this has paved the way for same-sex families in which two mothers or two fathers substitute for the natural complementarity of one mother and one father.

..........

Read more: www.ncregister.com