“Adam named her Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.”

Maybe they didn’t entirely live happily ever after– Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain, all the way down to us– but that Genesis 3:20 line always gives me a warm feeling toward Eve. Adam and Eve made some mistakes, but who hasn’t? Why wouldn’t they have?

Easy for us to say they shouldn’t have made mistakes, but that’s always the case. We are hard on others who make mistakes, and hard on ourselves even when we think we might have made a mistake, fallen short somehow, disappointed our mothers.

I was thinking about my own mother a week ago, and realized that I can’t remember a single time, a single moment, when she really seemed happy.

When she was near death, one day in the hospital, broken down by emphysema, she took great pains to dress herself because she had gotten the idea that she was going home. She wasn’t. Maybe for a few moments, amidst the pain of trying to dress herself, she was happy, and that merely served to deepen her pain when she realized she’d been mistaken.

For some, happiness in life is always paid for in suffering. Things turn out bad, and one wishes he had never been happy at all because the cost was way too high. One looks askance at the happy, at happiness.

I saw a floral arrangement paid for by an endowment from the estate of a great society lady. The plaque reads that this lady was always surrounded by beauty. I can’t help but be reminded, by that, of all the others whose lives are surrrounded by anything and everything but that sort of “beauty.”

My mother wouldn’t have thought of herself as one of those people. She loved the ballet, The Man of La Mancha, Frank Sinatra, sports, gardening, cooking, traveling, beer, wine, and her children. She was loved by her friends and family, and cared deeply that her sons be raised as people of good character. We four went to Catholic grade schools and high schools.

Like herself, my mother’s own mother had not been lucky in family life.

Because of men, women suffer: that was a clear lesson in my life. And because of girls, boys suffer: a clear lesson of my younger days. But who runs away from wives and kids? Men. Who gets a trophy wife? A man. How often does one read about the homeless father and his kids? The rich woman who abandons her husband of decades for the college quarterback?

Mother’s Day was perfunctory in my life with my mother. It takes a long time before a person grows up and out of the self-absorption of youth sufficiently to have any insight into the experience of his parents. One might wish to go back and treat one’s parents differently after he’s lived long enough to have a deep appreciation of them as persons, on a personal level, but that’s the beauty of living as we do, as children of Eve, children of God.

A father looks at any child with the intuition that that little kid is the most precious kid in the world to a father who is much like himself. Older people of a certain age– the mothers, the fathers. If they are not, maybe they are those one would never describe as always being surrounded by beauty.

Brothers, sisters, cousins, mothers, fathers, children: all of us are sons and daughters. In this life, of our own mothers; in history, Eve’s children; in eternity, God’s own.