Lawmakers, first lady: Happy Mother’s Day

The moms of lawmakers, and current and former first ladies are getting an extra bit of TLC this Mother’s Day, with everyone from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to Michelle Obama sharing messages ahead of Sunday for the women who raised them.

In a YouTube video titled “To All Moms” posted Friday, Boehner recalls some of his memories of Mary Ann Boehner, a mother of 12 who died in 1998.

{mosads}“If my mother got angry at us over something, she wasn’t at all bashful about taking the spark plug wires off the spark plug so the car wouldn’t start,” the Speaker says with a slight grin in the clip, “Devious.”
 
On the website MomsRising.org, Michelle Obama joins other women — including Arianna Huffington, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Fran Drescher, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), among others — in writing about lessons they learned from their mothers.
 
“One of the greatest lessons I learned from my mom was about the importance of education,” Obama writes of Marian Robinson. “Neither she nor my father had gone to college, but they were determined to see me and my brother get a good education.”
 
McMorris Rodgers writes on the same site of how her mother, Corene McMorris, “wrote me a letter every single day” when the future chairwoman of the Republican conference was homesick at college. She says her mom taught her “That sometimes you just need to follow your heart. And that a little lipstick really can go a long way.”

Pelosi calls her mom, Nancy D’Alesandro, “a woman of incredible energy and endless devotion to my brothers and me.” Writes the House minority leader: “She was deeply religious and she taught us the importance of faith, family, and community service.”
 
Laura Bush got in on the Mother’s Day action a few days early, posting a black-and-white photo Thursday on Facebook of her posing with her mother, Jenna Hawkins. The former first lady wrote the snapshot of her “sweet mother” was “in honor of Mother’s Day this Sunday. Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there!”

ITK has learned Bush will be posting another ode to her mom, who was born in 1919, on Facebook on Sunday. Bush’s Mother’s Day message will say, “My mother and I looking at the roses in the White House Rose Garden in October of 2001 #happymothersday #loveyoumom,” accompanied by a photo of the mother and daughter pair.