Mother's Day 2009

This morning my sixteen-year-old daughter woke me up for breakfast in bed. I'm not a breakfast-in-bed sort of person, so, groaning as I moved the muscles I had put to more use than they were accustomed in yesterday's gardening, I got out of bed to enjoy my Mother's Day breakfast. The breakfast M-M prepared included a scrambled egg decorated with two bright nasturtium blooms, a slice of Gimme Lean: Ground Sausage-Style Veggie Protein (my husband and daughter are vegetarians), buttered (Smart Balance Omega Buttery Spread) toast with jelly my own mother made. This was accompanied by a cup of hot tea. Yesterday my son had chatted with me on Gmail, assuring me that he had mailed me a Mother's Day card but that it would arrive late. I told him that he was just carrying on the family tradition of responding late to holidays such as Mother's Day and Father's Day. I tend to be late with such greetings. But I did call my mother this morning to wish her a Happy Mother's Day.

How did this Mother's Day tradition begin? Ruth Rosen has the story on Slate, "Soap to Ploughshares: Returning Mother's Day to its Original Meaning."

The women who originally celebrated Mother's Day conceived of it as an occasion to use their status as mothers to protest injustice and war. In 1858, Anna Reeves Jarvis organized Mother's Work Days in West Appalachian communities to protest the lack of sanitation that caused disease-bearing insects and polluted water to sicken or even kill poor workers. In 1870, after witnessing the bloody Civil War, Julia Ward Howe—a Boston pacifist, poet, and suffragist who wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"—proclaimed a special day for mothers to oppose war. Committed to ending all armed conflict, Howe wrote, "Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage. … Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."

For the next three decades, Americans celebrated Mother's Days for Peace on June 2. Women political activists of this era fought to end lynching and organized to end child labor, trafficking of women, and consumer fraud. In their view, their moral superiority was grounded in the fact of their motherhood.

When Anna Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna, vowed to honor her mother's political activism by creating a national Mother's Day. The gift card and flower industries also lobbied hard. As an industry publication, the Florists' Review, put it, "This was a holiday that could be exploited." In 1914, Congress responded and proclaimed the second Sunday in May to be Mother's Day. (Ruth Rosen, "Soap to Ploughshares: Returning Mother's Day to its Original Meaning," Slate, posted Friday, May 8, 2009).

I loved my breakfast in bed and the camera my husband purchased for me (our old one just died). However, I bet many mothers feel as I do that any time our children do something that illustrates they've carried on our values or learned some skill we taught them, that's Mother's Day for us. When my son spends Saturdays volunteering at an organic farm near Austin, Texas, that's Mother's Day for me. When my daughter spent one week (over 40 hours a week) out of each of the past two summers helping with home repair for people who couldn't afford to pay for that work, that was Mother's Day for me.

Rosen reminds us that the first Mother's Days were really Mother's Days for Peace, celebrated on June 2nd for three decades. I'm all for returning Mother's Day to its original meaning: a day to celebrate political activism, in honor of our mothers, who taught us to do right.