Happy Birthday...

to George Washington. I see no point in going on about him, though. We already know he was the first president of the United States. He rejected the notion that he make himself king. He owned slaves. He had bad teeth, but they weren't made of wood. What I find more interesting is the story of his mother, Mary Ball Washington.

When my kids were little, I found a book entitled George Washington's Mother by Jean Fritz. It was full of so many unexpected facts, I giggled all the way through it. We read books aloud quite a bit back then, and this one was in the stack of those most requested, along with Where the Wild Things Are and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Mary became a widow in 1743, and she was left alone on a farm with five small children. In those days, women weren't expected to be assertive or free spirited, and Mary was both of those things. If she didn't want to dress for guests, she wouldn't. If she didn't want her young son George to join the navy, he didn't. If she wanted to smoke a pipe or daydream by the well or let animals run free in the house, who was to stop her? Despite her moderate wealth, she was plagued by a fear of poverty and was forever scrambling to make sure someone would be around to secure her future. She had plenty of land and live stock, but none of that mattered. She needed constant reminding that she would not end up destitute.

Once, she ran out of butter and was beside herself. Who would provide? So, she wrote a letter to her son George who was off fighting the French. His men were starving and freezing and not fairing well. But his mother wanted butter.

During the Revolutionary War, when George's troops were really suffering, Mary felt "in want," and she wrote to the Virginia government asking for an allowance. She was the general's mother, after all, and they had taken her son away to meddle in someone else's affairs, as she saw it. George was incensed. Mary's need was all in her head, he said, and she was to stop borrowing money from friends and pleading with the government for unnecessary aid. Think of that embarrassing dispute the next time you see the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. You just think he's focused on victory when really he's wishing his mother would stop shaming him in front of all the colonials.

After George became president, Mary died at the age of 81. The whole country mourned, and at the president's house, there were no parties for a week.

"Everyone has a mother. Even George Washington. Of course, she hadn't always been his mother. Once she was just Mary Ball, a pretty girl from Virginia. Pretty as a rose." You don't always think of people as having a mother when you see them in monumental or historical situations like crossing the Delaware to fight for independence from the king. Alexander the Great had a mother. So did Genghis Khan and all of the popes and Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi and Osama bin Ladin. It's a kind of leveler for the good and the bad, I think.

So, while it's George Washington's birthday, I'd like to honor Mary Ball Washington today, the feisty, worry-wart of a woman who gave him life to begin with.