It’s Mother’s Day, so here’s today’s Mother’s Day thought …

I’m just going to say it … Mothers aren’t stable.

Mothers aren’t stable. We all know it, so can we all just admit it?

Mothers aren’t stable, but not because of anything inside them. They aren’t stable because we’ve asked them to do and be impossibly contradictory things.

The typical mother is half human, half girl, half woman, half business professional, half wife, half mother … and we all know that’s too many halves. But that doesn’t stop us from demanding she be all one thing or all another at the precise moments when we need it. It’s the impossibility of motherhood that makes them extremely fragile in some ways, superhuman in others, and generally unstable.

Motherhood is a profession like no other. No other profession asks so much, nor alters its practitioners so much in the doing, and no other profession operates from the heart wrenching premise that the very goal of one’s total life commitment is for your work to find a life of its own and go on without you.

Motherhood is in fact all about those apparent contradictions. A mother is a woman who chooses to no longer be the center of her own universe and instead makes her children the center of her universe for the express purpose of teaching them that they are not the center of the universe.

That is why our mothers are no longer strictly sane and it’s our impossibly contradictory demands that made them that way. We think they nag, and they do, but what we forget is that as a culture we constantly nag them. When does a day go by when a mother isn’t somehow being asked, “Are you sure you’re taking good enough care of the kids?” And at the same moment we ask, “Why aren’t you taking better care of yourself?” Or, “Why is it so hard for you to be the sexy goddess that helped get you into this situation in the first place?” Oh, and also, “How about that career, and were are my socks?”

So, yes, let’s just admit it, mothers are intrinsically unstable and more than a little insane. But let’s also admit that we are the reason. And that instability in her? That’s a kind of continuously controlled explosion—a nuclear reaction to unbelievable pressure—that has produced the kind of raw energy which fuels our lives and our civilization at very little cost to us. So don’t be surprised such an unstable state of energy gets a little radioactive or occasionally has a meltdown.

What’s truly amazing is that something like Mother’s Day can be enough to even slightly cool that reactor. But then again, as demanding as they sometimes seem to be, mothers don’t really ask for much. A little brunch, some flowers, a phone call, a hug.

Just FYI, I’m pretty sure she needs more than that, but it’s not a bad place to start as a small repayment for all she’s done for us.

And every day, I think we should do what we can to help her rediscover herself, not as mom, but just herself. And I think we can and should do all we can to help her build herself a beautiful life.