211018 Sentinel, Mothers and Wives

Celebration of Women

This treatise is based on my life experience and I believe many of other men’s lives.

We men tend to take women for granted. I believe this stems from birth. We are nursed and coddled by our mother as infants and then at school age, mothers wake us in the mornings, ensure we are dressed and ensure we get to school on time. Mothers cook our meals, comfort us when our hearts are broken, encourage us to do well and become a decent person. Mothers wash our clothes and iron or fold or hang them on our closet. They do all the other necessary tasks around the home, things like washing dishes, dusting, vacuuming, mopping floors, cleaning toilets.

Once we are grown we usually either get married to a woman or share an abode with a woman who in either situation takes over those motherly functions. We men often cruise through life from cradle to grave never thinking much about all those things that women seem to automatically take over and accomplish.

There is an exception to what I have written above and that is what I am experiencing these days. One day just over a month ago, suddenly I became a widower. I have lived for 76 years without giving much thought to all the things my mother and my wife Joyce did for me. How could I have been so ignorant and lacking in appreciation of the myriad of things those two women did every day for me? I have no good answer. That said, now I am on a fast track learning all of the things they did for me and I took for granted. All of those things are difficult, tiring and unappreciated by men and children and men that are children who never grew up.