A quick Mothers' Day message for you

If you, too, are wary of the Hallmarky nature of the holiday....

Sometimes I’m not clear on the purpose of Mother’s Day. To give moms flowers? To make moms feel bad if they don’t get flowers? To give moms one day of rest? To make certain moms, like single moms and moms with deployed spouses and moms with extreme caregiving demands, feel bad that they can’t get even one day of rest? (I see you, single moms!)

Google tells me that Mother’s Day, as it exists in America, was initiated by Anna Jarvis in the early 1900s. She wanted a day for families to honor their individual moms. She wanted zero commercialization of the day—and she railed against the floral industry when it jockeyed for the rewards.

But she also wanted zero politicizing of the day. She didn’t like that Eleanor Roosevelt used it to raise awareness for charitable causes. She might not have liked that her own mother organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to combat infant mortality. She wanted the apostrophe between the R and the S—as in, one’s own mom. Not at the end of the S—as in, all mothers. She fought hard for the placement of this apostrophe.

But individualism wears us all out. (And, Jarvis never a mother herself, died alone in an asylum, a fact that says more about our individualistic society than it does about her.)

My prayer is this: That every person receives the grace to see the world through a maternal gaze. That we all become true mothers, in the sense that we all behold every single human being on this planet as our beloved, as someone in our care.

And if we all bore that maternal gaze for every person, we would start a political revolution the likes of which this planet has never seen. One borne of tenderness and grace and love.

Happy Mothers’ Day, Friends!