A Mother's worth

By Dian Vujovich

How do you measure a mother’s worth? By the number of days she works, the hours she dedicates to raising children and tending to her family or the life-long care and love she provides? Try to put a dollar amount on mom regarding any combination or all of those notions and you’ll be at the calculator forever and ever.

You could go at it on an hourly rate. But how much an hour would be fair? Florida has just raised its minimum hourly wage to $7.31. Big woo! And for how many weeks, days, months and years would we figure this? Given that a mother’s job is a 24/7/365 until the death of her memory makes that number crunching impossible.

But let’s try. Using that skimpy minimum wage of $7.31: 40 hours a week equals $292.40 (no taxes, FICA, health insurance costs, savings or retirement contributions included); times 52 weeks a year, $15,204.80; until she passes on to the Great Mom Beyond at a ripe old age of 90 comes to $1,368,432. Not bad. But $1.3 million doesn’t really cut it, if you ask me.

Or, we could give her an attorney’s wage. At $350 and hour that comes to $14,000 a week; $728,000 a year; and over 90 years is over $65.5 million. Now we’re getting somewhere. Then again, it’s still not enough.

If we were to equal mom’s worth to the net worth of the richest woman on the planet that would amount to $26.5 billon. That’s better, right? It’s also the net worth of Christy Walton. She’s the world’s richest mom who inherited her fortune six years ago when her husband John died. He was the son of Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton.

But truth be told, dollars don’t matter when it comes to mom and her worth or value in your life.

It matters not what kind of relationship you’ve had with her–good, bad, ugly or indifferent— she’ll always be your mother and you’ll always be a child of hers no matter what.

A mother can be remembered as a mom even if she has died for nothing can take one’s momliness away. Moms live on within us and without us. And in the end, no matter how you slice, dice or calculate it, none of us would be here without one. Hummm, how much do you think that’s worth?

Happy Mother’s Day!