There are only six days to go until Mother’s Day. If you have or had an old-fashioned type of mother, you will never forget that date. You wouldn't dare. When I was a kid mothers were something special: they were large, they were loud, and they knew all the answers. I had no trouble believing that they were direct descendants of the original mother-goddess of antiquity, and shared her terrible powers. The modern moms I see waiting to pick up their kids from the school bus don’t seem to have quite the same air authority. They look kinder and gentler, slimmer and prettier, and alarmingly young. I'm sure my mother was never like that. I don't know why this change happened, but I suspect it has something to do with the magazines at the supermarket checkout, celebrating the virtues of eternal youth and beauty. In the past, once women became mothers they became motherly, or perhaps matriarchal is a better word: but not now, in the youth-obsessed 21st century. The new style of motherhood is