Ahh, perfect Mother’s Day art for The Brew, I thought, ye olde mama robin, feeding her yappy babies in the nest. I’d been thinking for a couple of days about this nest just outside my sunroom window, especially during yesterday’s torrential downpour.

Exploited females of all species! Noble moms from across the animal kingdom! I was ready to whip out the text to go with the shot.

Then I remembered a book my mom had around the house and showed me, “The Natural History of Nonsense.” It aimed to puncture all kinds of popular myths, superstitions and syrupy nostrums, including the idea that birds sit on nests out of maternal instinct.

Turns out they have itchy inflamed “hatching spots” on their undersides and sitting on those eggs just feels good.

So said the author, the skeptic, Bergen Evans. Who knows if he was giving us any scientifically accurate, ornithologist-approved information in his odd 1946 book. The message from him, and more importantly, from my mom, was to question received wisdom and assumptions of all kinds.

Evans’ book stuck a pin in the notion that gender and race could reflect intelligence or character and in all kinds of puffy propositions I didn’t even know needed to be popped – depictions of the biblical Adam with a navel, the moral behavior of animals, the idea that children had been raised by wolves.

My mom had – and still has – all the maternal cred of that robin.

But along with protecting us in real and metaphorical downpours and feeding us, her yappy babies, whenever we cheeped, she provided for us in so many other ways and this was just one of them.

Thanks, Mom, for the reminder to be curious, to always ask questions and to look for the alternative narrative.