I don’t like when holidays became all but compulsory to observe. With religious holidays it’s particularly unwelcome, but even secular celebrations can get that way, carrying the weight of oppressive tyranny by a majority group. It’s like the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on prayer, basically overlooking that in that case, the public meetings in Rome, NY, began with prayers of one dominant faith, over and over again, for years. The plaintiffs documented an almost total monopoly ely Christian benedictions, yet the majority of justices voted to allow these regular observances, as if the exclusivity didn’t matter, or shouldn’t have been seen as contrary to the US constitution.

Back to Mother's Day for a bit: I never wanted to be a mother and I am v happy childfree. Love to other women who mother in other ways xo

— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) May 11, 2014

It was the above tweet by Mona Eltahawy that got me thinking about all this, even as I’ve been enjoying memories of my own mother and my whole family, today. Eltahawy’s an outspoken Egyptian-American feminist I admire, about whom I first wrote in 2011, when she was beaten and mistreated by Egyptian security officials. I approve of her affirmation that a person who isn’t a parent is not a lesser person. Also, let’s remember that many of our holidays are promoted and brought to us by the greeting card industry, the chocolatiers, the florists (in NYC, the cost of flowers is higher on holidays). Those businesses are entitled to make a living, too, but sometimes it all just get to be too much.

With that slightly misanthropic sentiment out of the way, I want to say happy Mother’s Day to all who observe it, and note how grateful we are to our mothers, those who came before and those in our midst still, improving the lives of their children and so many people around them.  Here are pictures of all, or nearly all, the mothers in my life, along with other relations. Included in these pictures are my late mother Sylvia Turner (1921-2006), who married Earl (1918-1994); Sylvia’s father, Louis Shiff (1901-94); Earl’s sister, my Aunt Francis (1922-2009); Sylvia and Earl’s eldest child, my sister Pamela, mother of Ben and Emma; Sylvia and Earl’s middle child, my late brother Joel (1951-2009); me with my mother Sylvia; and Kyle Gallup, my wife and mother of our son, Ewan Munro Turner, a baby in 1996.