Mother’s Day: Something We Celebrate
Platitudes are familiar ideas that can be said without thinking. But, when you think about them, most clichés reveal a deep and universal source.
Here’s one: Everyone alive is the child of a mother.
I can’t even describe how strange it is for me to think about. I walk around, seeing mothers – doing the shopping, driving the cars, at work with photos of their children on their desks – and the sheer volume of relationship is staggering to think about. Every one of those mothers is bringing up a child, or several children. Each one of those mothers is responsible for the continuation of the human race. And each one of those mothers has a mother, all the way back to the very first mothers way before recorded history. It boggles the mind.
The original American Mother’s Day began as a proclamation written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870. Twelve years earlier, she had penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic on a stump in a Union Army Camp. But living through the American Civil War, and its aftermath, changed her direction. Calling for an International Mother’s Day celebrating peace, Howe wrote:
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
"Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience.
"We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
The history of Mother’s Day can be seen as an interesting interplay of idealism and commercialism. But I’ll let go of that, now. Here we are, in 2012.
I’m getting on a plane tomorrow to visit my mother. This is one of the years her birthday coincides with Mother’s Day. (I still remember my grandmother’s deadpan delivery – “I so wanted her to be born on Mother’s Day. . . I ecched her out on Monday!”)
I’m bringing presents. I feel like a kid, coming back from kindergarten, trying to make her happy . . . two spring sweaters (she has been complaining for over a year now that she has no clothes). A book of stories about dogs written by famous writers (she used to love to read, but now she is impatient with most writing – but maybe some of these stories will catch her craftwoman’s ear and her attention). A huge art book of Maurice Sendak (lots of pictures, interesting history . . . He died last week, and I discovered that he and my mother are the exact same age). There’s still more I’m bringing. But you catch my drift.
The easiest thing to talk to my mom about these days is old memories. I’ll remind her of the time she and sister went to Washington D.C. in 1984 to participate in a peace event, commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Julia Ward Howe would have loved it. Everyone made a cloth square representing something they loved, and it was all strung together in a mile-long ribbon to tie around the Pentagon.
My mother and sister made a picture of a baby. I can still remember the instamatic shot of them holding it up in the yard, smiling, ready for their journey.
We have, every one of us, been that baby. We are, many of us, mothers. Many of us will grow old. Many of us won’t get that chance.
There is a way in which the commercialism and the idealism merge into the giant stream of individual memories and experiences and ideals that is life. It is a stream made possible by mothers.
And, on Mother’s Day, that is something we all celebrate.
Adrienne May 13, 2012
Thank you for that lovely post. It was the perfect way to start my Mother’s Day. I feel like motherhood has been under attack by the media these past few days and I found your post to be refreshing.
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Thank you.