Ever since Saddam Hussein, the once and now gone president of Iraq, proclaimed, before the beginning of the Gulf War, that the war would "be the mother of all wars," countless people have employed the phrase, modified to fit their situation, to underscore what they alleged to be the gravity or importance of their claim, saying, "the mother of this or that," etc.
     To say that something is the "mother" of all similar things that preceded it is to implicitly acknowledge that for every thing, there is a larger thing on which this thing based.  A mathematician might say that every set is a subset of a larger set, the "mother" of all sets.  As Aristotle pointed out long ago, however, to view reality in this way means that we could wear ourselves out, physically as well as intellectually, trying to determine when we have found the "set" or "mother" of everything else.  It's endless.
     This reminds me of what many consider to be one of the logician Kurt Godol's greatest insights, that there are axioms, that is, laws of numbers, that cannot be proven.  We simply accept them as they are.  To link this to the idea of a "mother" of all things, whatever those things might be, we might say that, in the end, we either accept the existence of a starting point or framework (a "mother) whose existence we cannot definitively prove, or find ourselves in an infinite regress from which there will never be any return.