Why Mother’s Day belongs to all of us: childless, motherless, and moms.
“Happy Mother’s Day to a woman who didn’t really try, but didn’t abort me, either.”
“Happy Mother’s Day to my therapy inspiration!”
“Happy Mother’s Day – I forgive you.”
“May your Mother’s Day reflect back to you all that you put out as a mother.”
Do you ever wish you could find a greeting card with a message like these? Mother’s Day can be complex, and for so many of us, painfully difficult. It is hard to celebrate a holiday that has become an overly sentimental exercise in celebrating idealization, where anything less than sainting the woman from whom you were born is seen as ungrateful or selfish.
But this ideal wasn’t the reality for far too many of us, myself and my clients included, and loss or unrealized dreams creates waves of sorrow for others. The cultural pressure to pretend can feel smothering. Opting out feels shameful. For many, it would be easier to somehow skip this day of flowers and brunches and Hallmark messaging, to ignore it until it goes away. To quell the ache of not belonging in the celebration by submerging until it is over.
And yet, eliminating Mother’s Day would be a step backward, retracting the minimal recognition women receive for our significant contributions to both home and society. And we would lose out on the universality of celebration to which all caring women belong – well-mothered, motherless, parenting, or childless.
Mother’s Day was founded in intention not to call every birthing woman the “Best Mother Ever” or promote the conservative trad-wife ideal of barefoot and pregnant make-me-a-sandwich subservient kitchen maids, but in social justice. In women empowering women and rallying to make the world a kinder, safer, more livable place.
It’s what we’ve always done. It’s what strong women still do.
In the mid-1800s, an Appalachian woman named Ann Marie Jarvis organized the first Mother’s Day Work Clubs to help lift one another out of poverty. She later formed Mother’s Friendship Day to promote reconciliation after the end of the Civil War. Building on this foundation, a suffragette and abolitionist named Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation in 18701 in a call for women to work for the cause of peace and embrace of multiculturalism. In the 1800s, a century before birth control and long before access to higher education delayed the start of families into more physically challenging years, womanhood and motherhood were nearly synonymous. But the emphasis of this day was never on childbearing, but on activism.
Ann Marie’s daughter, Anna Jarvis, pushed for her mother’s ideals and work to be memorialized and codified by calling for a nationally recognized Mother’s Day in her honor and in honor of all women. After six years of campaigning, her vision was realized in 1914 when U.S. president Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day an official holiday. (It is now celebrated in over 90 countries around the world, with the most common dates in May.)
Do you know what Anna Jarvis wasn’t? A mother. That’s right – you don’t have to have babies to celebrate Mother’s Day. The woman who pushed for the codification of Mother’s Day never had children.
This day is ours, women. We created it, we called for it, we cultivated its ideals. We do not need to succumb to idealistic messaging that does not connect to our own experience. No one needs to feel less-than for living out a different reality than what the dominant voices push for or say should be celebrated. Childless women, transwomen, mothers estranged from their children, women estranged from their mothers, mothers whose children are no longer living – all are worthy of honor if we maintain and fight for the ideals of justice and peace, if we uphold and uplift one another, if we continue in the power and presence of compassion and vision that has characterized our gender for centuries. This is who we are, and this is what we celebrate.
So if today feels exclusionary to you, if you feel like everyone is celebrating and you have neither mother nor child to turn to, this is your invitation to lift your head and spread your arms wide, to embrace and claim this day as your own. We are powerful agents of change and forces of compassion; we are the powerful rivers through which justice will roll down and create a world of peace, of equity, and of love. This is our mother energy, and we will not let it be dammed.
May your tender wounds find comfort, and may we give this compassion and grace to one another. May you feel celebrated today by the great chorus of women who stand alongside you and who have gone before in recognition of all the good you bring to this world.
- Mother’s Day Proclamation, Julia Ward Howe, 1870
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, 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 trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace. ↩︎