Bright Ideas

Last week I didn’t forget Mother’s Day, I just didn’t have anything new to say, until I looked up its history. A celebration of mothers was held by Greeks and Romans; they were honoring the mother goddesses, Rhea and Cybele. The first Christian festival was known as “Mothering Sunday.” That was the fourth Sunday in Lent, a time when the faithful were expected to return to their “mother church on Mothering Sunday.”

Ann Reeves Jarvis created an American holiday in the years before the Civil War. She organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to teach local women how to properly care for children. Was she an early day ‘Dr. Spock’ ? In 1868, she organized “Mothers’ Friendship Day,” where women and former soldiers might gather together to promote reconciliation. How did that work?

Abolitionist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” that asked mothers to promote world peace. In 1873 she campaigned for a “Mother’s Peace Day,” to be celebrated June 2.

Other Mother’s Day pioneers were Juliet Calhoun Blakely, Mary Towles Sasseen, and Frank Hering. Some call Hering the “father of Mother’s Day.”

Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday in 1914.

By 1920 Howe had become disgusted with the commercialization of the holiday and outwardly denounced and urged people to stop buying flowers, and recognizing charities. By the time of her death in 1948, Jarvis had disowned the holiday and even lobbied the government to have it removed from the American calendar.

In the United States Mother’s Day continues to be celebrated the second Sunday in May, by giving flowers and gifts to mothers and other women. It can be a day free of cooking responsibilities and housework; and it is also one of the biggest days for consumer spending.

Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., used Mother’s Day to host a march for underprivileged women and children. In the 1970s women’s groups used the holiday to highlight the need for equal rights and access to childcare.

I am usually the recipient of flowers, unless the Market doesn’t have any. I don’t need any gifts — I buy myself almost everything I could want! I have sugar free chocolate candy twice a day, and decaffeinated coffee most evenings. I’ve had to give up wine; it doesn’t go with pain medication.

I have everything a mother could want: a loving husband, two wonderful, successful children, and six grandchildren. My daughter and son-in-law chose to live in Ekalaka, and visit us every week, with their three children. What else could a mother want? Nothing I can think of.