Mother's Day in the time of the coronavirus

"When you called in the evening, I knew you were calling to wish for Mother's Day," my sister said.

We have routines.  Every other day, I call India to check in on my folks--but always their mornings, well after sundown here in America.  My brother calls them from down under at lunch time.  Rarely do we deviate from this pattern.

A regimented life in so many ways!

The following is a slightly edited version of the Mother's Day post from 2013:
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Growing up in India, there was no concept of a special day for mothers.  Nor fathers.

After coming to the US, especially during the initial years, the concept of wishing mother or father seemed strange.  Very odd.  The idea of wishing on a designated day is the strange part that is, not the idea of recognizing the mother's importance in life.

I imagine that mothers were way up high in pretty much every culture's list of important people, and the old country emphasized it in so many different ways.  A long, long time ago, we learnt a verse in the Sanskrit class in high school:

राजपत्नी गुरोः पत्नी मित्रपत्नी तथैव च
पत्नीमाता स्वमाता च पञ्चैता मातरः स्मृताः
- चाणक्य नीति

Transliteration:
raajapatnI guroH patnI mitrapatnI tathaiva cha
patnImaataa svamaataa cha pa~nchaitaa maataraH smRutaaH
- chaaNakya nIti

Meaning of the subhAShita:
The king's wife, the teacher's wife, friend's wife, wife's mother and his own birth mother - these 5 should be deemed as mother figures

It is interesting that the couplet includes "mitrapatni" in this list--perhaps as a way of telling guys to stay away from ogling their friends' wives!

In the old country traditions, the older women in the extended family were all mothers and grandmothers.  I have had an incredibly lucky life with wonderful motherly women.  As I noted in this post, my mother, grandmothers, and aunts, even literally made sure that my life was sweet.

It has been almost forty years since my last Sanskrit class.  The teacher, Pattabhiraman, who taught us those wonderful couplets and more, also deserves a huge thanks--even though his gender will get recognized only next month on father's day.