Meghan Moses: What mothers really want (Opinion)
I am a mother of 5-year-old Lulu and 2-year-old Thomas, which brings with the role all the joy, frustration, exhaustion and gratitude you can imagine. In celebration of Mother’s Day last weekend, I had the pleasure of so many kind gestures and gifts that I truly appreciated and made me feel loved.
My lovely husband and I had the best gift of time, courtesy of his mother’s generous offer of watching the aforementioned toddlers for the weekend; if anyone is looking for the ultimate present to their kids who have kids, giving them a break is the gold standard and the key to their sanity. I received flowers, kind gifts, nice sentiments. The kids’ school had a lovely Mother’s Day program where they sang songs like “You Are My Sunshine” and made us cute gifts. The standout was a fact sheet that my daughter filled about called “All About My Mom,” where she perhaps inadvertently called out some of my shortcomings with some answers like, “My mom always says: don’t hit my brother” and “If she had time, my mom would: do laundry.”
Because I had the gift of time, I got the chance to reflect on the day and what it means. I ran across the etymology of the holiday, which West Virginia native Anna Jarvis created to honor her own mother in 1908. Anna’s mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, was a well-known social activist and organizer of “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to educate mothers on sanitation and how to curb disease and other proactive tips of “social motherhood” that not only sought to take care of their own children, but a community of children.
Unfortunately, Anna’s vision of the day did not coincide with how others saw it, and she fought her entire life against the commercialization of it. She battled the floral industry, the greeting card industry and the candy industry. She even clashed against figures such as Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt and charities to benefit mothers.
Anna wanted the movement to be her movement, and she wanted it to be celebrated from the perspective of a daughter honoring a mother, not of a mother honoring motherhood. She thought the way to celebrate it should be with a trip home to see your mother, or if you could not make the trip, you would write her a letter expressing your thanks. This was supposed to be a day of gratitude and respect, not a day to shill products or to feel sorry for mothers. On this one day, do we have to make mothers feel inadequate if they were poor or uneducated? Anna wanted an unconditional message of “You’re a good mother.”
Sadly, after multiple lawsuits and years of attempting to reclaim her vision of the day, Anna died penniless in a sanitorium in 1948.
