Brunch is booked and the BBQ is full of gas. Our extensive gift guide is helpful for planners and procrastinators alike. Our feeds are filled with happy ads like hockey moms and school bus drop-offs. Mother's Day reminders are everywhere.
It could be a wonderful day, I hope it's a wonderful day for you.
It can be unbearable.
I think this year will probably be the first difficult year. Or the 20th. Many of us have lost our mothers. Sure, this is the natural course of life, but it can be painful to be reminded again and again every May that she's no longer around to celebrate.
This day can also be difficult for those who, for some reason, have a less-than-picture-perfect relationship with their mother and are perhaps estranged.
And for couples who are having trouble conceiving or women who have experienced a miscarriage, the holiday can be painful. Especially if you have to commemorate the day anyway with family members and other children running around.
For mothers of older children with serious mental health and addiction issues who don't even know where they belong, being forced to feed happy family stories and sickening stories can be nauseating. I'm sure it will be held.
Perhaps the influx of Mother's Day messages doesn't matter to those who have suffered the worst of it – the death of a child. Why do we feel such deep sadness?
Single mothers don't always enjoy the day either. Single parents with young children don't get to sleep in their beds, enjoy gourmet breakfasts, or any other special treatment like that. (I ate popcorn on toast two years in a row.) They probably won't go to the spa unless an outsider steps in to provide the experience or babysit. In these homes, the happy, nuclear-regulated family situation depicted in the ubiquitous media and greeting cards could come up in flames.
To make matters worse, women caught up in ugly custody battles may never see their children on Mother's Day or even on Mother's Day.
I hate to sound like a bummer, but I have to keep in mind that this is not the day for every family to enjoy brunch and roses.
This year is also a particularly good year to reflect on the roots of Mother's Day, especially one branch that grew out of war. The typical Hallmark holiday didn't start out as a single holiday.
The origins of Mother's Day as we know it in North America date back to the 19th century. A Virginia woman named Ann Reeves Jarvis, after experiencing the death of several of her own children, began her Mother's Day work to promote a healthy and sanitary environment for raising children. I helped start the club.
In 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, she organized Mothers' Friendship Day to promote reconciliation between former Union and Confederate soldiers and their families.
In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, a poet and suffragist who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic, called for a Mother's Day of Peace. She wrote a “Mother's Day Declaration” calling for action for her mothers to unite for peace.
After Jarvis passed away in May 1905, her daughter named Anna Maria Jarvis came up with the idea for Mother's Day to honor the sacrifices mothers made for their children. She argued that American holidays are biased toward male accomplishments. It started with a small celebration at a church in West Virginia, and the idea grew.
In 1914, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation officially designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. It became an official holiday in Canada in 1915.
Anna Jarvis' victory did not last long. She despised what had become the commercial nature of the holiday and its use for political purposes. She said her own idea of wanting to honor and honor her mothers, including her own mother, who fought for reconciliation after the war, was overshadowed by her flower and candy sales. She felt that it was getting thinner. She died penniless after a legal battle to stop her Mother's Day from becoming a money-making mega-event.
Although her Mother's Day proclamation is more than 150 years old, it is still very relevant.
“Our sons will not be taken away to make them forget all the charity, mercy, and patience we have taught them,” it reads in part. “As women from one country, we are too kind to women from other countries to allow our sons to be trained to harm our own sons.
“From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice like ours rises. It says, 'Disarm!' Please disarm! ”
Mothers are strong. In Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant women fought to end the unrest. Women for Peace, an organization made up of Palestinian and Israeli women, is currently carrying out important work in the Middle East.
Perhaps it will be mothers who will find a way out of the endless death and destruction of today's wars. Every child must die for the ideology they were born into, the land they grew up in, or the land that ambitious people seek to rule.
