The Magical Moments of Mother’s Day

The real Mother's Days, to my mind, consist of the most magical moments of being a mother. The prime occasion may well be when the baby kicks for the first time during pregnancy.

Over the years there are other mother's days: when your child hugs you and says you're the best, when your children make you proud by doing well in school, when they achieve some recognition for an original thought, essay, creation or physical ability; when they bring their friends to meet you.

Finally, when they suddenly mature and show equally genuine interest in you, your activities, your history, and your state of being, they create the best ''Mother's Day'' of all, for friendship is the greatest gift children can give their parents. ''Mother's Day is such a stupid holiday,'' my mother used to scorn. ''But why is it a stupid holiday, Mother?''

''It's stupid because you should love your mother every day, not just one day a year. I don't mean with presents; I mean with consideration,'' she would say.

Still, the year I decided to believe her disdain of material recognition, I detected a faint quiver of her lips when she told me too brightly that my sister had bought her the begonia plant that I ''usually'' got her. She had accepted the plants as forerunners of a lifetime tradition. But I just happened to have bought the same kind two years in a row.

Still, a plant was easier to come by than the very first present I'd given her. At the age of 8 I'd filled a 10-cent copybook with school compositions and poems I'd laboriously written in longhand. Since my academic career was not very far along, my output was not prodigious.

To solve the problem of filling the empty pages, I went to Woolworth's and laboriously copied out the verses on Mother's Day greeting cards. It was pretty hard to write neatly while standing in the aisle with people going by. One of them happened to be the manager, who commanded me to leave.

One year my husband and I were dining in a Toronto restaurant on the holiday. We watched the room fill up with family groups whose focal point was usually an old, or perhaps not-so-old, corsage-pinned woman. At first everything seemed very genial and warm at a nearby table. I could see a maternal-looking daughter helping The Mother choose from the menu. There were lots of smiles around the table, except for an occasional whimper from a child in a highchair. But after the food came, everyone completely forgot about Mother. She just sat there round-shouldered and smiling, occasionally sniffing her corsage for something to do.

The ritual struck me as an embarrassing travesty. It was awesome to realize that it was being replicated in thousands of towns and cities in countries around the world!

Perhaps Mother's Day should be viable only for celebrants under the age of 10, because without a doubt, the handmade gifts of innocent children are the most endearing and memorable ones. Those cards - ''I will love you forever''; ''You are the dearest mommy in the whole wide world,'' and so forth. What mother has not cherished such sentiments spelled out in wobbly crayoned letters?

And some of the presents - such marvels of diversity! There was no question that the kite my young son presented to me one year was what he considered the finest possible gift! My artistic daughters touched my heart with such presents as a papier-mache mirror devised from a wooden spoon with ''I love you'' painted on its handle, an inch square hand-bound book filled with tiny drawings of a heart, a flower, a rainbow and a butterfly, and a painstakingly brass-wrought comb that became the star of my comb collection.

Surely there were no children more loving, sweet and wonderful than mine, unless you considered the children of my friends who, in their own ways, were equally marvelous.

But children grow up. They still love their mothers, if only subconsciously, for now they have found themselves to be good objects of their affection. A friend of a grown-up child reported last year: ''He asked me what I'd like for Mother's Day. Can you imagine?'' Another: ''He got me an electric frying pan but I'll never use it.'' Another: ''Isn't it ridiculous! Flowers at the height of the spring season! I can't bear to think how much money they paid for them!''

Sometimes I wonder why this yearly extra birthday continues to exist. Even if it were the left out mothers the legislators were think of when they passed the Mother's Day bill - that is, those who were assured of at least one day's attention from negligent children - didn't they do as much harm as good? Doesn't the holiday accentuate for some the painful absence of a once-loved child, a drifter, a prison inmate, a hospitalized patient, a dead serviceman or a child who died? To these mothers the day may seem designated to accent their perpetual grief.

Perhaps, then, my mother was right and ''Mother's Day is a stupid holiday.'' Nevertheless, I concede that I anticipate the cards or presents, the badges of recognition, material or not, that may come my way.