Today is Mother’s Day in the United States. In preparation for a planned post here about mothers, I have been thinking of mothers in literature.

There’s the bad: Anna Karenina, for one. “Mommy Dearest” a.k.a. Joan Crawford, from Christina Crawford’s autobiography. The mother in Sybil, in Stephen King’s Carrie …

And the good (this one was harder for me): Marmee in Little Women came to mind immediately, as did Ma from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. My daughter mentioned Mrs. Weasley from the Harry Potter series as a good mother.

Then there were the moms that did the best they could: the main character in Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, Angela of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. And though she titles her new book “Bad Mother,” I think Ayelet Waldman belongs in this category as well. She caught a lot of flack for her New York Times essay “Truly, Madly, Guiltily”, where she confessed that she loved her husband more than she loved her children. Many immediately put her into the “bad mother” category. But Ayelet’s book reflects the realities of many mothers today: we judge ourselves based on impossible standards and utopian ideals that are impossible to achieve in the real world.

The bulk of the mothers in the world will never have a book written about them. They are unremarkable to all but their own families. I include myself in that category. And so Mother’s Day is the day to celebrate those moms. To call up your mother and tell her that she is special to you, even if you never memorialize her in print, or write a tell-all about that time when you were 14 and she grounded you.

To all of the mothers reading this, Happy Mother’s Day. You are remarkable to us.