The brunches are booked, the barbecues gassed up. Gift guides galore are assisting planners and procrastinators alike. Sappy ads saturate our feeds, featuring hockey moms and school bus send-offs. The Mother’s Day reminders are everywhere.
It can be a lovely day, and I hope it is for you.
It can also be excruciating.
Maybe this is the first excruciating year. Or the twentieth. Many of us have lost our mothers. This is the natural order of life, yes, but the constant reminders each May that she is no longer around to celebrate can be painful.
It can also be a hard day for those with less than picture-perfect relationships with their mothers, perhaps even estranged, for whatever reason.
And for couples having trouble conceiving and women who have suffered pregnancy loss, this holiday can be agonizing. Especially, perhaps, if you must mark the day anyway, with family members and a bunch of kids who aren’t yours running around.
For mothers of older children with grave mental health or addiction issues, who might not even know their whereabouts, being force-fed the happy-family narrative ad nauseam must also sting.
Maybe being bombarded with Mother’s Day messages doesn’t matter for those who have suffered the worst thing: the death of a child. How could such grief possibly descend any deeper?
Single mothers don’t always relish the day either. Solo parents of young children will not be sleeping in or enjoying a gourmet breakfast in bed or any such special treatment. (I did get popcorn on toast two years in a row.) They will probably not be going to the spa, unless an outsider steps in to offer the experience – and some babysitting. In these homes, the ubiquitous media and greeting-card depictions of happy, nuclear-normative family situations can burn.
Worse, women caught in ugly custody battles might not even be able to see their children on Mother’s Day, or any day.
I hate to be a bummer, but we should be mindful that this is not a day of brunches and roses for all families.
This year would also be an especially good one to consider the roots of Mother’s Day, and one branch, in particular, that grew out of war. The quintessential Hallmark holiday did not begin as one.
The North American Mother’s Day we know dates back to the 19th century. A Virginian woman named Ann Reeves Jarvis helped start Mothers’ Day Work Clubs to promote healthy and sanitary conditions for raising children after experiencing the deaths of several of her own children.
In 1868, three years after the U.S. Civil War ended, she organized a Mothers’ Friendship Day, promoting reconciliation among former Union and Confederate soldiers and their families.
Then in 1870, poet and suffragist Julia Ward Howe, who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic, called for a Mothers’ Peace Day. She wrote a “Mother’s Day Proclamation”: a call to action for mothers to unite for peace.
After Jarvis’s death in May, 1905, her daughter, named Anna Maria Jarvis, came up with the idea of a Mother’s Day to honour the sacrifices mothers make for their children. She argued that American holidays were biased toward male achievements. It began with a small celebration in a West Virginia church, and the idea grew.
In 1914, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation officially establishing the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. In 1915, it became an official holiday in Canada.
Anna Jarvis’s victory was short-lived; she despised what became the commercial nature of the holiday, and its co-opting for political purposes. She felt her idea to honour mothers reverentially, including her own mother who had fought for reconciliation after the war, had been overshadowed by sales of flowers and candy. She died penniless from her legal battles in trying to stop Mother’s Day from becoming the money-making behemoth it did.
Her Mother’s Day Proclamation, more than 150 years old, is still terribly relevant.
“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience,” it reads, in part. “We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
“From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: ‘Disarm! Disarm!’”
Mothers are powerful. In Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant women fought to bring an end to the Troubles. Today, in the Middle East, the group Women Wage Peace, made up of Palestinian and Israeli women, is doing crucial work.
Perhaps it will be mothers who find a path out of the interminable death and destruction of today’s wars. Nobody’s child should have to die for an ideology they were born into, or a land they were born in. Or a land over which ambitious men wish to rule.
Marsha Lederman