May
Mother’s Day
Over the years, my mother has slowly given me some souvenirs from my childhood. Baseball cards, my first books, you know, the kind of things that I left behind when I was packing to go to college. Recently she gave me back some gifts I gave to her when I was younger, things like my senior picture and a plaster-of-paris hand print that I made in Bible School as a kindergartner.
While thinking about Mother’s Day this year, I thought about a gift I gave her as a young child. It is a piece of cardboard covered with green burlap with a candle I made out of yarn and glued on the board. Above the candle is a poem I wrote for her. The poem began, “I love my Mother, better than any other …” Not exactly e. e. cummins or Robert Frost, but it expressed a little boy’s affection to his mother.
I don’t get sentimental about motherhood. I’m sorry, but in a nation where women “have the right to choose,” but a baby doesn’t have the “right to life” I don’t equate pregnancy with virtue. Some mothers abandon their children, abuse them or treat them as if they are a bother. It is not motherhood I honor. It is my mother. She is a godly, kind, caring, friend who at my hands, suffered the pain of childbirth, teenage rebellion, and watched me become a man. She’s fed me, changed me, sacrificed for me and loved me. I can never repay her for what she’s done—all I can do this year is what I did as a child writing her a poem and say, Mom, I love you.
I’ve always sent Mom clippings of my published articles and copies of the books I’ve written, but I have an idea that she cherishes that simple poem more. It is the only piece of my writing that she hangs on her wall and probably the last memento from my childhood she’ll ever return to me.
Mother’s Day
In 1872, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Howe suggested the idea of a special day set aside to honor Mothers and celebrate peace, but the idea never took root. Never that is, until the early 20th century.
A couple years after her mother’s death, Anna Jarvis held a ceremony to honor her late mother. The experience so moved her, that she began a campaign to establish a formal holiday to recognize mothers. West Virginia adopted the idea in 1910, other states followed their lead the next year and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday of May “Mother’s Day,” a national holiday to honor mothers.
Something Jarvis could be proud of? Not exactly. A few years later, she was arrested for disturbing the peace at a Mother’s Day rally. Jarvis deplored the commercialization of the holiday and the way people used it to make profits. In 1923, she filed a law suit to stop a festival where the organizers were selling white carnations as a fund raiser on Mother’s Day.
She didn’t lead a campaign to begin this holiday so card companies and florists could make money, she wanted it to be a day that stirred sentiment in the children of the world. She was more successful in starting the day than stopping it. Regardless of some people’s motives, the idea of honoring mothers was contagious.
Today, we thank the Lord for our Mothers and the care they give us. It is the right thing to do.
Exodus 20:12 NIV “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”
Jim L. Wilson, Fresh Start Devotionals (Fresno, CA: Willow City Press, 2009).
Comments