Mothers Day. Bonnie shook me up.

It is Mothers' Day. My companion Bonnie gave me a laugh and a few shocks. The laugh was when she told me what Mark Twain said in answer to the question where would men be without women. In a side splitting response he said; "Scarce son. Mighty scarce." This is brilliant. It is from the book "Half the Sky" which all of us, especially all of us men should read.

Then we got talking more seriously. Bonnie has five children. She raised about changing diapers. As far as we can see at a rough estimate Bonnie has changed around 15,000 diapers in her life. I was stunned when we discussed this. But even more stunned when I realized that I had never changed a single one. How can women be expected to play the same role in the paid workforce and have careers which are well paid and satisfying when they have to do such an amount of extra work.

Men help more today. Partly because of the changes in society, the womens' revolt, the black revolt, the movement of women into the paid workforce, the need to have two wages to keep a home going. But what should happen is that the state should force employers and itself provide free child care everywhere and make it more possible for fathers and mothers to share the childcare. This could be easily funded by what is spent on the wars abroad and the bail outs of Wall Street.

Bonnie breast fed all her five children. She is a strong believer in doing so. Yet this means that with one year breast feeding each child for five years she was on call twenty four hours a day for five years. And Bonnie says she was lucky as she was a stay at home mum. Needless to say I have done no breast feeding.

I have to stop here now as Bonnie has started to tell me that on top of this she spent forty five months pregnant. She is building up a head of steam and before it is over I will feel like an utterly inadequate useless creature.

I am off. Happy mothers day.

Sean.

PS Maybe we should also keep in mind today that the Catholic Church thinks women, that mothers, are inferior. They cannot be priests or bishops or cardinals or popes. At the same time they make all this propaganda about Mary the mother of Jesus. There are mothers and mothers apparently as far as the Catholic Church is concerned. Did Mary the mother of Jesus have childcare? The Catholic church uses the image of Mary the Mother of Jesus to intimidate its members. It gets sicker and sicker.

Sean.