Happy Mothers Day
I’m not going to bore you with another mother story; everybody has or had one.
And everybody has a mother story that will bring out the tears. Most mothers, however, are pretty average though to their offspring they are anything but.
Take my mom. She was a Holocaust survivor, having escaped a Nazi death camp. She came to the U.S. when she was in her 20s and had no formal education. But she persevered and earned a medical degree, later specializing in pulmonary diseases.
She settled in Utah where she raised me and my 12 brothers and sisters. My grandmother helped out. She had her own amazing story, having survived the sinking of the Titanic. It was not an easy life but my mom hung on, even though my father left the brood early on, leaving my mother to care for all of us.
Actually none of the above is true. But it got your attention. If I told you the real story, you’d probably doze off. But when it’s your mother, she is special regardless of the details.
Actually, my mother was quite a survivor, enduring three bouts of cancer, losing two husbands and playing referee in a family that defined the word dysfunctional. That’s all true. I think she would have done alright if she was living now.
Human moms sacrifice a lot for their children. But compared with Caecilians, they are totally self-absorbed.
Caecilians are amphibians that look like huge worms. They are found in rainforests but live much of their lives in underground lairs. The larvae eat using their sharp tiny teeth, to rip off mommy’s fatty, nutrient-rich skin. Within three days, mother’s skin has regrown and it’s back to the feeding frenzy.
A black lace weaver spider mother makes the ultimate sacrifice. She pushes down on top of her spiderlings, which then devour her. A scorpion mother is just as selfless; if she can’t get food for the kids, she lets them suck her juicy joints dry.
If I had my druthers, I’d be raised by a herd of elephants. Talk about caring. Each mother in the herd take turns caring for each other’s kids. By helping each other, the babies are never left alone while mothers have time to create more milk. It also gives new moms a well-deserved break as they carry 300 pound babies for 22 months.
Human moms complain about never getting any sleep. Don’t tell that to orangutan mothers who are in physical contact with the babies for the first four months of life. The clingy children hang to moms for five years and sometimes live through breastfeeding well into their sixth year.
Human dads try to help but they’re not always around. Tamarin males raise the babies, giving the moms a break until the next little ones come into the world.
Human mothers and fathers may say they would do anything to protect their children. But the female octopus backs it up with action. The average octopus lays between 50,000 and 200,000 eggs. She spends the next two months protecting them from predators and shoving water currents toward the eggs to provide oxygen. Mother is so busy that she often forgets to eat and dies soon after the eggs hatch.
Parents of human newborns often go to great lengths with wallpaper and baby things all over.
Clownfish, however, give a new definition to getting ready. The expectant parents create a nursery by cleaning out an anemone.
Once the eggs are laid and fertilized, clownfish dads clean them until they hatch, and both parents fan the developing babies with their fins to provide them with a constant supply of oxygen-rich water to increase their chances of survival.
And then there is the strawberry poison dart frog. They are small but able. The females lay eggs on the rainforest floor, and then the frog dads guard them from predators and urinate on the eggs daily to keep them moist.
Once they hatch, the tiny tadpoles have a tendency to eat each other. For protection, mother removes every baby to live alone in a safe pool. She visits each nursery pool daily for about 50 days and lays unfertilised eggs in the pools to feed her babies.
Just like humans, poison dart frogs, clownfish, octopus, tamarins, orangutans, elephants, caecilians and black lace weaver spiders think their moms are all something special even if others think moms are just doing their jobs.
Happy mothers day to all.