For all you Mothers out there! I was checking my emails and this was one of them....

Moms are the Best!

Everyone knows who the really famous moms in the world are. But in the United States alone, there are more than 80 million regular moms doing the real work of motherhood day in and day out—without any of the fanfare or fawning press coverage.

We read that the average mom puts in a 13-hour day doing what she needs to do for her family, working paid and volunteer jobs, and doing family-related chores. That means more than a billion hours a day are spent every single day by moms taking care of the rest of us. Think about it. A billion hours a day. Even at a dollar an hour, that’s a lot of value.

But it’s the little things moms do that get us really choked up, especially when we think about that fact that these little scenes play out constantly in the lives of American families.

For example, one friend’s 2-year-old had been working really hard with the sidewalk chalk when big raindrops started to fall from the sky. The mom and her daughter dashed inside only to watch the masterpiece melt in the rain. The 2-year-old did what kids that age do—she melted down. And so her mom took her down to the laundry room, gave her more chalk, and let her recreate her masterpiece on the safe, dry walls, walls that had just been cleaned of fingerprints.

Another friend, who’s going through all sorts of sad times with her extended family, has a tradition of baking her kids any kind of birthday cake they want. This year she set aside her troubles and made a giant rainbow explosion of a cake—just as her daughter hoped for, because moms don’t let their own broken hearts get in the way of their kids’ dreams.

You probably have memories of your own mom reading stories to you at night, or digging through the trash can for your retainer, or of the time she drove you all over town looking for just the right kind of soccer shoes. And if you’re a mom, you’ve probably done these things yourself.

And if that’s the case, you probably shrug and say it’s all in a day’s work. But it’s more than that. It’s a lot more than that. It’s the kind of work that makes everything possible for the people who will one day be running the world. It’s the kind of work that makes all the difference for us when we need it most.

Here’s to all those moms out there making the future great, one small, quiet act at a time. We owe you more than you could ever know.

--Martha Brockenbrough