#HappyMothersDay

 

13-Year-Old Boy Sells Xbox, Works Odd Jobs to Purchase Car for His Mother

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone! Just an FYI, we also send out a daily email (and daily podcast) about parenting over at DailyDad.com. We’d love to have you join us. Happy Mother’s Day!

If you were to run down the list of the great Stoics of history, who would come to mind?

Seneca. Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus. Maybe if you really knew your stuff, you’d mention Zeno or Cleanthes or Chrysippus.

What do all those people have in common? They were all men. But is that somehow representative of what it means to be a Stoic?

Far from it.

Here on Mother’s Day, let us rectify this by looking at the woman who raised one of the great figures in all of history and got very little credit for it. In Book 1 of Meditations, Marcus writes about his mother Domitia Lucilla. He writes about “her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it. And the simple way she lived—not in the least like the rich.” One of Marcus’ biographers confirms that Marcus’ mother was positively unusual. Imperial Romans, were told, “while paying lip-service to the spartan austerity of republican Rome, were not notable for their self-denial; they also believed in conspicuous consumption and, by living thus while possessing such a great fortune, Domitia Lucilla was in effect distancing herself from her class’s dominant ethos.”

Yet how many people even know her name? Or the names of the countless Stoic women throughout history who raised, supported, taught, encouraged and sacrificed for their families and their country? Who better illustrates the Stoic virtues of endurance and courage, selflessness and duty than the generations of anonymous wives and mothers and daughters of Greece and Rome who suffered, who resisted tyranny, who lived and died without ever being recognized for their quiet heroism? Think of what they put up with, think of the indignities they tolerated, and think of the sacrifices they were willing to make.

But that’s sort of the problem. We don’t think about that. We think about Marcus Aurelius. We don’t think about his mother.

As we celebrate mother’s day today, let us think about just how much mothers matter! Let us think about how they have shaped history as much as, if not more than, the famous Stoics we read and talk about so much here. Certainly, they had to put up with being underappreciated, misunderstood, taken for granted, and being deprived of many critical rights. They did all that on top of having to give birth…and know that they might well die going into it.

The fact that they did this, along with countless other sacrifices and daily obligations, and did so bravely and patiently for so long is proof that they are true Stoics. And not only do they deserve our respect for it—but they have a thing or two to teach everyone else about what focusing only on what you can control really looks like.