One Of My Favorite Singers and Songs, For Mother's Day

"Mama," by Marta Kubisova

I’d like to wish everybody, however you bring your maternal mercy into the world, a Happy Mother’s Day. We will all be reflecting on our own mothers, and it’s not an easy day, for many. The quality of a mother, the mercy and the love, transcends the material world, gives it light and warmth. Mothers also have powers to shape and also maim, (as nobody needs me to tell them.) It’s a trivialization of a mother to pretend she is only there to be sweet. Her mothering will be as good as her situation is stable, and she’s not the only one in that story. Good fathers give children good mothers, and vice versa. We need to start over, and remember the fundamental sanctity of the family. Mother’s Day is a commercial phenomenon, but still, it is a day of reflection.

One of my reflections is this:

It is not necessary to have children to be a mother, to bring the quality of mothering. Women mother beyond their own children. Other people’s children. Elderly. Gardens. Strangers. Animals. Mothering is tending, with mercy. Attentiveness. Listening. Presence.

I woke up to a lovely text message from my son, and will soon speak with him, from Spain. I love him so much, and am immensely proud of him.

I have wanted to share a song that I am transfixed by.

I’ve mentioned my love of Czech

legend Marta Kubisova, who I by sheer accident heard sing in Prague, during the Velvet Revolution, November 1989, after she had come out of decades of house arrest

for opposing the communist tyranny. Well, she has this song called Mama. I don’t know the words but if anybody here is Czech and would like to translate, I’d be most grateful. I’m posting two versions, one is the original video, which suggests the song is an anti-war song, perhaps. The cinematography is very interesting—a little bizarre. It’s fair to say I am fixated on this song, “Mama.” In the second video, Marta is much older, and singing the song with another singer, as a duet.

PS. I wrote this, about my mother, who died in 1999. I miss her every day.