The way we say it By Daniel Soto

“A mother’s children are like the fingers of her hands,” she said. “She can no more forget one of her own than she could cut off one of her fingers. A mother’s children are a living part of her.”

After a year Ricardo was released from prison. I remember hearing him loudly berate and verbally abuse his mother as I walked past their house on the way to visit my grandmother one afternoon. I felt angry and sad to hear him speak so harshly and insolently to the one person on earth who loved him so unconditionally and had supported him unquestioningly while he had been incarcerated.

I felt as though I should intervene and explain a few things about respect to young Ricardo. But my mother had also taught me that it was unwise and nearly always futile to become involved in the domestic disturbances of others. So, alas, I passed the house by, and continued on my way. But those coarse insults that I’d heard Ricardo hurling at his poor mother echo troublingly in my memory even today.

A few months later Ricardo was arrested again; this time on the much more serious charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Soon we noticed that Doña María had resumed her weekly pilgrimages to the jail. Rain or shine, she never missed a Saturday. Her unflagging devotion to her ne’er-do-well son impressed and moved me deeply. Though Doña María’s lot in life was a sad one, her response to it made me love and respect my own mother even more.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you, even if you yourself are not a mother, for to quote last year’s Mother’s Day dicho: Madre, solo hay una.