Friday's column: Stealing Mother's Day back
Mother's Day was not always like this.
Before the Valentine-esque price gouging on flowers and the four-course brunches and the treacly Hallmark cards and the uber-pink kitsch of the Breast Cancer Walk, it was a day with a serious point of view. And it had nothing to do with celebrating some June Cleaver ideal of sweet, feminine domesticity.
When Julia Ward Howe, the American suffragist and peace activist, started lobbying for a "Mothers' Day for Peace" in 1870, she envisioned it as a war protest.
The Civil War -- an unimaginably brutal and bloody conflict -- had just ended and, in Europe, the Franco-Prussian War was just beginning, setting the stage for the world wars to come. So Howe organized women to rally for peace, declaring, "Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. 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 train.
The idea that only men wage war, and that only women nurture the homefront, seems painfully old-fashioned now. But the image of the "war mother," desperately worried for the safety of her soldier-child, stays with us.
Sometimes, in fact, it seems like mothers are the only ones who can talk about war in purely human terms. The rest of us are expected to be somehow more worldly in our perspective, taking politics and strategy into account. We are supposed to think of the loss of human life as "regrettable." We are not supposed to take it personally.
Changing more than punctuation
When Anna Jarvis picked up the idea of a Mothers' Day in 1907, she was seeking a way to honor her own mother, Ann Marie Jarvis, who had been a community organizer in West Virginia and was the force behind several "Mothers Friendship Day" meetings that, in the aftermath of the Civil War, reconnected families that had been divided by the war.
Anna Jarvis managed to build national momentum for the holiday, which was recognized by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.
But something got lost in translation.
Instead of a day for mothers, in the collective sense, recognizing their power as social reformers and advocates for peace, the day became a celebration of your mother and what she did for you. It was no longer Mothers' Day, but Mother's Day -- and that difference in that apostrophe, moving from the plural to the singular, was all the difference in the world. Instead of celebrating what mothers could do out in the streets, the day recognized only what they did at home.
Several wars and social movements later, we still stick to that official script about Mother's Day. We say that being a mother is the most important job in the world -- Really? More important than teacher or medical researcher or war crimes investigator? -- and that motherhood is all about the kind of selfless sacrifice that only the most colorful flower arrangement can repay.
But for all the conservative rhetoric about how life begins at the moment of conception, giving biological mothers a special connection to the value of human life, we don't hear much about how mothers might also have a special perspective on war.
Cindy Sheehan can't be the only mother out there who feels ripped off by the idea that the life of the son she carried for nine months was later so easily given away. When was it, exactly, that the life of her child was supposed to stop being sacred?
Celebrate with spirit
True to the original spirit of Mothers' Day, the women's antiwar group Code Pink is planning a weekend vigil outside the White House to protest the war in Iraq. And, closer to home, peace groups will be handing out Mother's Day flowers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Wacker and Wabash and rallying in Independence Park on the North Side.
But even if your mother, like mine, is not exactly the protest marching sort, it's still possible to celebrate this weekend's holiday with a little less Hallmark commercialism and a little more community spirit.
You can give to charity in your mother's name -- even if she's secretly disappointed at not getting flowers, she'll have to be happy about having raised you with such good values -- or help her sort through some of your childhood possessions to see what could be donated to others.
You can organize the mothers in your neighborhood to tackle a project, like cleaning up a playlot or helping out a needy family.
You can find a soup kitchen or food depository that needs volunteers and sign up to spend a shift there with your mom.
Or you can just go to brunch like you always do. But, this year, maybe take a moment, between bites of $20 French toast, to think about those seriously cool mothers who try to make the world a better place, not just for their own children, but for all of us.
