Paying Tribute to Mothers

Our mothers shape us. Whether through kindness, control, neglect, or guidance, their influence on the adults we become stretches far beyond the genetics we share with them.

The mother of bioacoustic scientist Katy Payne stoked her curiosity and imagination. In Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, Payne writes of one childhood incident that would have had very different consequences had her mother been cut from the same cloth as, say, Mary Karr’s mom or my father-in-law’s Tiger Mom.

School officials informed her mother that Katy had been getting to school increasingly late. In fact, on that particular day, she had arrived two hours after the other children.

Without reprimand, her mother coaxed from her the reason for the tardiness: Katy had devised an experiment to see if she could differentiate by taste the maple trees she passed on the way to grade school. Her mother’s solution was to wake and dress Katy before sunrise the next day so she had plenty of time to sample the sap of each tree and still get to school on time.

It’s stories like this that make us happy to honor our mothers today, or honor the women who acted as mothers to us. These are the memories worth sharing and savoring with others—especially with the very individual who shaped who we’ve become.