Mother, May I?
May 14th, 2017 by Kimberly
What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.
MOTHER TERESA
via habitsforwellbeing.com
The woman who successfully lobbied Congress to establish Mother’s Day ended up hating the very thing she had created. In Anna Jarvis‘ mind, the day involved spending time with your mother. She intended it to be your mother’s day, a day when you did things for her so that she could rest. If you couldn’t visit, you could at least write a long letter, and not scribble your name on a greeting card where a company had already printed the words.
All the literature I read said that Ms. Jarvis got the idea from her mother, Ann Jarvis, who had set up several different occasions for mothers that failed to take off. Small wonder – the senior Ms. Jarvis always insisted on making mothers do things on these days. She had dreams of mothers taking care of soldiers during the Civil War, and not caring whether they happened to be Union or Confederate. She put together a day to reunite mothers with families split apart by the war. She kept focusing on mothering, rather than on mothers. You don’t need a marketing expert to figure out that a day when mothers had to do more work was never going to take off.
Probably they were both right. Those who mothered us – the woman who gave birth to us or the woman who adopted us or the woman who lived next door but always seemed to be around when we needed a big scoop of unconditional love – deserve recognition and gratitude, and we do that best both by spending time with them and by extending that love to the rest of the world we encounter.
Thank you, Mom, for giving me your love, your patience and your smile.
Kimberly’s definition of mothers are people who endured all of our teenage years and still look forward to seeing us.
