Mother S Day

You're always telling your mother you owe her. Now, the American Coalition for Labor Reparations has a worksheet you can use to calculate exactly how much back pay Mom deserves. Here's the logic: “Every laborer deserves a wage. Your mother went into labor for you and has never been repaid.” We should mention that the coalition doesn't exist for most of the year - it's a gag dreamed up by ad agency Mother New York. There's even a faux PSA video featuring a crew of mothers - some describing pretty graphic scenarios.

Every parent knows what it's like to fail his or her child in some important way. We speak a hurtful word. We are absent at a critical moment, or we simply fail to hear what our children are telling us. The three moms I met this week at the Homegirl Café know this feeling well. It was a few days before Mother's Day and we sat down together for lunch and talked about the many sorrows they've inflicted on their children. "You make wrong choices, and your kids pay for them," Veronica Duran, a 39-year-old mother of two, told me. The personal histories of these three moms include drug abuse, homelessness and stints in prison that caused them to miss many, many of their sons' and daughters' birthdays.

Mother's Day flowers may seem like a nice enough gift, albeit predictable, but is a bouquet the most thoughtful way to honor your mom or, for that matter, mother nature? The folks at Freakanomics Radio broached this topic on Marketplace , asking: “We live in a day and age where people are obsessed with 'food miles' and the carbon footprint of everything they consume. So where is the outrage over these globe-trotting Mother's Day flowers?”  The majority of the flowers sold in the U.S. are imported from around the globe, specifically South America.

Hey, happy Mother's Day, U.S. moms! You're No. 25! As my colleague Eryn Brown wrote, the aid organization Save the Children released its annual State of the World's Mothers report Tuesday. And though the United States isn't Niger, which ranked last in the report, it was found lacking among its industrialized peers. The United States performs relatively poorly among the 43 developed nations in the rankings because mothers here have a 1 in 2,100 risk of pregnancy-related death - the worst of any industrialized nation, Save the Children said.

Here's a Mother's Day offer in which Mom gets to give as well as receive. Loews Hotels offers a $20 donation card from DonorsChoose.org for mothers who come to brunch Sunday to mark their special day. There's also a card for Mom that kids can decorate.  The deal: The hotel brand's offer is good at the chain's 17 hotels nationwide, including properties in Santa Monica and near San Diego. Mom can "spend" her money at Donors.Choose.org to buy books, musical instruments and cameras for schools or help fund a special field trip.

A week before Mother's Day, Ms. Bidwell announced the essay contest for Mother of the Year. She passed out paper and pencils. Katy Keene was stumped. What could she write? Her mother was the queen of mean! Katy chewed on her pencil and sucked the eraser. (Which her mother would never allow.) She got an idea. Her eyes squinted, and her lips curled. Scribble, scrabble, scribble, her pencil almost flew! When the bell rang, Katy was still writing. Ms. Bidwell let her take the essay home. Katy wrote before setting the table and after drying the dishes.

Every day, she talks to her son. Doctors give him little chance, the public no longer pays much attention, but nearly every day for more than a month, the mother arrives at the cramped ICU room at County-USC Medical Center to talk to her comatose son. He is Bryan Stow, the San Francisco Giants fan who suffered a serious brain injury when he was attacked in the Dodger Stadium parking lot on opening day. She is Ann Stow, and she wants...

Mom deserves special treatment every day, but spas all over Southern California are making it easy to spoil her on Mother's Day, offering special deals on massages, treatments, relaxations, classes and products. And it's not just for her; since Mom loves you, she's going to want you to benefit from all this discount feel-good too. Ole Henriksen Face & Body Salon During the month of May, the acclaimed spa offers the Like Mother Like Daughter treatment (30-minute lavender hydrotherapy soak by candlelight, customized facial, one cleanser and one eye cream specifically suggested by your esthetician, $250)