This Mother’s Day will bring the usual outpouring of love and affection to mothers everywhere, especially in Guyana. It will certainly be a break from the harsher acts being committed on our womenfolk over the past couple of months: murder, abuse, etc. The newspapers tell the sick stories of when our mothers face the knives, cutlasses, and evil hands of their murderers. To add insult to injury, many of these cases are not even solved. This opens the floodgates for more and more demented men out there to lay hands upon our mothers and womenfolk. Mothers today and our women in general are living in challenging times. Jesus Christ, on his way to being put to death 2000 years ago, foreshadowed what is coming to pass today against our women: “Weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children,” he said. Yes, today our mothers are weeping; weeping from the grave at the way their lives are snuffed out like that!
Many mothers, for the sake of their children, remain and endure the abuse in the home. It is easy for many of us to ask, “If all the signs were there, why didn’t she leave him?” But for a mother, it is not that easy. It’s a mother’s first instinct to be with her children and to spread her wings over them. She would endure hell and fury just to be close to her children. Empowering women seems to be lacking in our society.
A woman who feels subservient to her male counterpart is in the ideal situation where her rights can be trampled upon. And this exists on a large scale in Guyana today. Many of us have not evolved culturally. Some of us are stuck in time, totally ignoring the fact of women’s liberation and the rights of women everywhere. The laws are there, but those who lay hands on our women should endure stiffer penalties.
What are the churches, mandirs and mosques doing to put a stop to this?
The murdering and disfigurement of our mothers reflect a deeper ill underlying our society: the poor role models our young men and women have these days, especially the boys. Are our young men today taught the values to never lay a finger on a lady or to treat a female with respect? You would witness the embryonic stages of this societal problem from children in school. At the school level, you would get an early picture of the future. There would be boys calling girls all sorts of derogatory names, and even physically harassing them. That is a preview of what behaviour is to come later on in life.
My mother, like many mothers out there, is a family woman. She values nothing more in the world than her family. She would lay down her life for her children. My mother would go insane if anything were to happen to one of her children, especially me. I am still her ‘little boy’ and maybe that is why every time I am always a little boy in all her dreams. That of course, expresses the joy she had with me caring for and nurturing me – the joys of motherhood. Maybe, though, I take too much for granted. She asks, “You Okay?” especially when things are not right, as if she had some telepathic powers – “Mom is always here for you.” She caters to my every need, going mad whenever she does not hear from me after a while, and then there are all the sweet goodnights each night on the computer. I could never find anyone else in this world who loves and cares for me more than my mom. The best gift any of us could give to our mothers is making them extra proud.
Mitch Albom’s For One More Day is a philosophical book about a mother and son, and a relationship that lasts a lifetime and beyond. It explores the question: What would you do if you could spend one more day with a lost loved one, a mother? It’s a book my mother gave me a few years ago that brought me to tears at the end. The mother in the story loved her family, and her boy, who after losing all confidence in himself and turning to a life of alcoholism, gets a visit for one last time with his mother.
If fathers and men teach their sons and the young men to respect everything about a woman, then maybe the photographs of mothers who had been brutally killed would stop being on the newspapers’ front pages. Maybe when boys start to value their sisters and want the best for them, too, that that value would be transferred to other females and women.
Our society is lacking badly in the way we treat women and more particularly, mothers. Each and every one of us can play a very important part in breaking this generational curse on our women. I challenge everyone this Mother’s Day to give mothers and women the respect they truly deserve; to do their part to ensure the survival and continuation of this most important group of women in our midst, our mothers. May God bless them all.
Yours faithfully,
Leon Jameson Suseran
