Comments and complaints

C: Your policy of honoring mothers on Mothers Day is commendable, but why exclusively choose mothers of large families?  Is the value of a mother determined only by the number of children she has produced?  There is a wide variety of mothers raising children. There are widowed mothers and single mothers struggling to raise one or two, there are foster  mothers and adoptive mothers raising children who were not born to them, there are grandmothers raising the children of their ill or absent adult children and there are stepmothers raising "blended" families.  Next year, please consider honoring all mothers in your celebratory addition. Where would families be without them? - M.K.

A: I have to assume that you are a new reader of our newspaper and unfamiliar with the Mothers Day stories we've published over the years. We've written about foster mothers, about foster grandmothers, about mothers of adopted children and children with disabilities, about single mothers, and, most controversial, about moms behind bars – criminal mothers incarcerated on Mothers Day. We've written about mothers from their children's point of view, and from the perspective of their husbands, friends, siblings, parents and themselves. This year, the "hook" for the story was moms with big families.

Next year, our writers will undoubtedly find another hook on which to hang a Mothers Day story. You'd think they'd run out of options, but society keeps coming up with new variations to write about. Who knows? Maybe this same-sex marriage business will open up a whole new box of hooks.