A Mother’s Day Worth Remembering

 

 

You’ve probably never heard of Anna Jarvis.

She created the holiday we celebrate today, known as Mother’s Day.  This occasion was first recognized in 1914 when President Woodrow Wilson signed a federal proclamation making the holiday official.  Today marks the 100th anniversary of the very first Mother’s Day.

 

Jarvis began the occasion to honor all mothers as the supreme tribute to her own mother, a remarkable woman from West Virginia who lived during the latter half of the 19th Century.  She died in 1905.  During the American Civil War, Jarvis’ mother treated injured soldiers on both sides of the bloody conflict — certainly a brave act for those times and the ultimate personification of being a humanitarian.  Throughout a self-fulfilling life, she was a dedicated social activist who sought to improve the lives of all people — be them soldiers broken from war, innocent children suffering various afflictions or other women who didn’t enjoy the same rights and privileges as men.  Jarvis learned a lot from her mother and eventually pursued similar causes in her mother’s footsteps.

Sadly as the years passed, Jarvis slowly came to regret what Mother’s Day became.  She bristled at the vast commercialization of the holiday she first conceived.  Jarvis increasingly became outraged as Mother’s Day morphed into a national marketing campaign and a means of profit, rather than a manifestation of genuine affection.

Indeed, throughout her life Jarvis never profited in any way from the holiday she started with a simple vision.  While business interests made fortunes over the next century, Jarvis became disenfranchised by what she observed, even going so far as to speak out against the annual holiday as it was hijacked by card makers, floral nurseries, delivery services, and candy makers.  Jarvis stated:

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.  And candy!  You take a box to Mother — and then eat most of it yourself.  A petty sentiment.

Jarvis’s personal life was something of a paradox.  She didn’t marry and never became a mother.  Oddly enough, the holiday she cradled failed to reward her for the sentiments she initially espoused.

There’s an irony to Jarvis’ success, that the accomplishment she’s best-remembered for turned into what she considered a collective spree of misguided treachery.  That said, perhaps the best way to truly honor this woman’s initial vision is to heed her words and accommodate her thoughts as our very own.

So…

How many Mother’s Day cards and flower bouquets and boxes of chocolate will end up in next week’s trash bin?

Most probably.

Not that these gifts aren’t appreciated.  They are.  What mother doesn’t like receiving cards or flowers or chocolates on this special day?  We insist these are expressions of our thoughts and tokens of our love.

But are they really?

Look, I don’t want to belittle the Hallmark Card you spent a full three minutes picking out at the local CVS store — you know, the one with all the pretty flowers printed on the outside and a poetic verse concocted by some un-credited wordsmith who’s stuck in a cubicle all day manufacturing generic pleasantries.  Holidays and special occasions have become a national playground for ghostwriters.

Plucking a card off the shelf or ordering flowers at an online website or buying a box of fancy chocolates at the supermarket serves as little more than commercialized surrogates of human emotion.  They’re a stand-in for genuine interpersonal affection.  How convenient for us to muzzle all that awkwardness when going out and buying something is so much easier to do.  Call this what it is — ersatz love and kindness, thanks to an assembly line of available substitutes.

Cynical?  Maybe.  Accurate?  Yeah, for sure.

Whatever happened to the simple things — kind words and gentle thoughts, a soft whisper and a caring touch, and most important time in our lives set aside for someone special, perhaps the most special of anyone?  No card or flowers or chocolate can replace what really matters, and that’s a sense of togetherness.  And when being together isn’t possible, a human voice and a caring word can go a long way.

This is especially true for those of us who have mothers who are still with us living.  Think of all those among us who no longer have mothers.  Wouldn’t they like to be able to celebrate this day with them, just one more time?

That’s why it’s incumbent upon all of us to do what we know to be right and what we know is good.

I’m really lucky.

I’m lucky to have a mother still living and healthy.

I’m just as blessed to have both of my grandmothers still alive.  That’s pretty remarkable, a testament to strong genes and good living, I suppose.

My great sense of independence stems largely from my mother and the way she raised me.  She taught me first-hand about self-reliance.  She and my father divorced when I was only a few years old.  While my father remained a significant part of my life and provided different facets of a stable foundation, it was my mother who I grew up with.  She raised me and therefore deserves much of the credit, but none of the blame.

Raising a boy alone must have been tough as a single mother.  But she never made me feel like a burden to her.  Not once.  That’s pretty incredible.  I regret that I didn’t give her more space way back then when she deserved to have her own life.  But I didn’t know any better.  I was just a kid.

My mother was a strong disciplinarian.  I didn’t like that much back then.  But I came to regard it as not only rewarding but essential.  She not only believed that hard work builds strong character, but she also practiced that virtue herself.  While my mother worked full-time when I was growing up, I was given my own set of responsibilities.  Every day after school, I was assigned the task of coming home and cleaning the house.  Every single day.  As I got older, my mother also taught me how to cook.  She was a wonderful cook, so I had a great teacher.

If I have a favorite memory while growing up, and there are so many, it was my mother reading to me.  I must have been about 5 or 6 when Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory first came out.  She read that book to me, cover-to-cover.  Never mind that she had worked a full day and was probably exhausted.  She always made time for me — to read or to cook or to go to movies or simply be together.  Who knew of the sacrifices she was making just for me?

Want to know something really incredible?  After she finished reading the entire book to me, which took a few weeks, I asked her to read it to me again.

And she did.

Because at the heart of it all, that’s what all mothers do.  They make the sacrifices.  That’s motherhood.  That’s my mother.  That’s caring and commitment and love.  And no card or flowers or candy can ever repay the extraordinary sacrifice that this amazing woman gave to me when I was small, which I continued to absorb as I grew, and which propelled me into becoming a responsible adult.  No card or flowers or candy can ever be grand enough to repay that debt and honor those sacrifices she made.

So on this day, looking back now upon those precious memories, whatever I chose to give back now simply is not enough, nor can it ever be enough.

All I can say is…I love you, Mommy.  I shall always and forever.