Blessed Mother

As an act of rebellion against the Hallmark holiday, I choose to honor Mother's Day on a Wednesday.
Don't get me wrong, I hope you all had a good dinner, or at least a phone conversation with Mom on Sunday. Mothers deserve to be honored and celebrated, as do women who approach motherhood from less traditional angles.  George MacDonald described a matronly character in one of his novels as "one of God's mothers," who, even though she never had children, managed to be a mother to pretty much every wayward castoff that came her way. This is for my wife, my mom, and all the women who have taken up the important job of nurturing, teaching, protecting and raising up the ones they love.
As a protestant, I never much understood the Catholic preoccupation with Mary.  I mean, I get that she is a compelling character, a young girl who found herself in a frightening situation, but who chose to answer God with trust instead of fear.  However, I always sort of gravitated back to the way that her situation was made precarious only by the stupid rules the men around her seemed to hold over her head.  Joseph, her betrothed, has to set aside a rather large chunk of his male ego, just to come to the place where he is going to "send her away quietly."  It is only a dream of an angel that convinces him to actually take the responsibility of being a father.
Father's seem to always have a choice, even after the child is a reality.  Mother's don't have that much of a choice.  Oh, some do abandon their children or are forced to make agonizing decisions, but think for a minute about how much more heart-wrenching the idea of a motherless child is than one with an absent father.  The latter is sad, yes, the former is an epic tragedy.  Mary was investing her blood and very possibly her life in Jesus, Joseph just had to set aside his pride.
I think maybe the reason we Protestants need to celebrate Mother's Day, is because we don't really deal with Mary as we should.  I understand that maybe some medieval traditions got carried away, but it really is comforting to find the blessed mother, in her little corner of an old church, praying for the sinners with such peace and beauty. To see her face is to know what love looks like.
The Eastern Church has a place for Mary, they call her Theotokos, the God-bearer, she has an indispensable role in the incarnation.  It is true that God did not do this thing alone.  The thing that mothers teach us from the time we are born is that we never do this alone.  They are constantly with us through those years that we can't even remember.  When we form our consciousness they are the most important person in our world.  As we grow up and start testing things out, even as we learn they are actual people with gifts and faults of their own, we know that we have a relationship that cannot be broken by anything less than a catastrophe.
We don't really need to be sappy and sentimental about this, because the thing itself has weight, it is sacred.  The problem I have with the Hallmark Holiday is always that, it falls back on saccharin platitudes and does not deal with the real power of the word mother and the blessings that should always come with it.