AS Jamaica and other countries across the globe celebrate mothers today, we would like to record our very best wishes for their happiness, because every woman who has unselfishly nurtured life, from gestation to birth and beyond, deserves to be celebrated.

We do not use the word unselfishly lightly.

For we are all too familiar — sadly — with the cruffish progeny of selfish mothers who have failed to carry out the awesome task of raising their children to be productive citizens as opposed to public health hazards and nuisances.

And it is to them, primarily, that this space is addressed today.

To those mothers — rich, poor and in-between — who are making a muck of the job, we say take time out today to consider your culpability in the demise of this society and how to make amends.

Never mind the excuses about the need to advance your professional lives at the expense of your children; the delinquent fathers; the lack of resources to do the job; the corrupt politicians who are turning out to be worse than the criminals they condone and the rest of it.

Every pot must find its own lid. Others’ failure to do so cannot excuse yours.

Go and figure out a way to navigate the obstacles that militate against the arduous challenge of successful child-rearing.

Swallow your pride, your fear, or whatever else is contributing to your failure, and speak up.

The Biblical book of St Luke is instructive in this regard.

It says: “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.”

Believe it.

Stop sacrificing your daughters and sons to the dirty dons who rule at the side of the evil, hypocritical politicians who installed them.

Stop turning a blind eye to the brutish men in your home who are sexually molesting and abusing your children.

Don’t — like the woman in yesterday’s edition who was arrested after the police rescued her unsupervised children from the hovel she calls home — keep having children with men who either cannot or will not maintain you.

Run for your lives and theirs.

You may ask — with justification — run where? to whom?

We say to anyone who will listen and help.

For we are confident that Jamaica is not so far gone as to be bereft of solutions.

There is always someone, somewhere in the public and private sector — organisations that give support to women in crisis — who can and will help.

To believe otherwise would be to accept failure.

And in spite of the murder, the mayhem and everything else that is wrong with Jamaica and the rest of the world, we are not ready to throw in the towel.

At least not yet.