 When Did I Get Like this? © 2010 by Amy Wilson (Morrow, 2010) |
Writer and actress Amy Wilson is the creator of Mother Load
, a one-woman show that has been touring the United States since 2007. She is also a contributing editor to Parenting
magazine, and has written for Babble.com and CNN.com. Her first book, When Did I Get Like This? The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I'd Never Be (Morrow, 2010), is now available in paperback.
On May 8, tiny breakfast-in-bed makers and last-minute Hallmark store visitors across our nation will observe the ninety-eighth official national celebration of Mother's Day. That singular "Mother's" is not a typo, by the way; Anna Jarvis, the foundress of our modern maternal celebration, decreed in 1908 that it should not ever become a pluralistic "Mothers' Day," in which we'd all honor all mothers, but always remain "Mother's Day," on which each of us would honor only our own. These days, there are plenty of cards out there with a misplaced apostrophe — but were she still with us, Anna Jarvis might consider that the least of our Mother's Day problems. While we can all agree that this sentimental "family" holiday can tend toward the overcommercialized, no one was more horrified by the oft-missed point of Mother's Day than the woman who started it all in the first place.
The tenth of 13 children, Anna Jarvis was one of only four who made it to adulthood. When her mother died on the second Sunday of May in 1905, Anna vowed to honor her memory by creating a national holiday. After launching a flotilla of letters to ministers and politicians around the country — and buying the house next door just to house her correspondence — the pertinacious Miss Jarvis did just that, seeing President Woodrow Wilson decree the second Sunday of every May a legal holiday in 1914.
Outrage After Outrage
But quickly thereafter, Anna Jarvis became outraged by the liberties people were taking with her holiday — and as we've already established, Miss Jarvis was nothing if not single-minded. Florists began upcharging for carnations shortly after May 1, so Miss Jarvis organized a boycott. When American War Mothers used that misplaced "Mothers'" apostrophe in their banner, Miss Jarvis was charged with disorderly conduct for bum-rushing their convention. And when some infidels took it upon themselves to add a "happy" to the sentiment — as in "Happy Mother's Day!" — Miss Jarvis threatened them with legal action. As far as Anna Jarvis was concerned, there was nothing "happy" about what was meant to be a day of personal remembrance, and so she spent the rest of her life attempting to dismantle the very thing she had wrought.
Miss Jarvis' idea of Mother's Day allowed for no teddy bears or bouquets, no heart-shaped assorted confections, nothing at all that could be bought. She was particularly irked by those sons of the Roaring Twenties who thought it sufficient to hand the woman who gave them life a greeting card with pre-printed sentiment. Miss Jarvis believed in writing a tender-hearted letter your own doggone self. But were she alive now, Miss Jarvis might really lose heart, because today, those same mothers would be lucky to get a heartfelt text: "thnkn of u ma!!" And if Miss Jarvis had ever seen kids cupping their hands under the chocolate fountain at my hometown hotel's Mother's Day Brunch, she might have cut someone right there.
Is One Day Enough?
 Amy Wilson |
All too often, a Mother's Day full of pomp, circumstance, and pink ribbons becomes more trouble for the ostensible honoree than it was worth. Mother's Day can give a whole family a guilt-free year of treating mom as a doormat, in exchange for one morning of runny eggs and burnt toast. What glittery "You are the Mother of My Children, Dearest Wife" card on one day can truly make up for dirty socks all over the floor on the other 364? In my childhood home, Mother's Day was a slightly stressful affair in which my father would bark at my mother, "Sit down! You're not supposed to be doing anything!" although she had in fact just made the eight of us dinner, just as she did every other night. All of us kids loading the dishwasher that one night was hardly sufficient recompense, especially considering she'd have to unload and reload the whole thing as soon as we ran off. But as a kid, I thought I deserved a gold medal for being so unbelievably selfless and honorable. At the very least, I was taking the rest of the year off.
Although she never became a mother herself, Anna Jarvis foresaw this all too well. Her last-ditch effort to finish off her personal Frankenstein was in 1943, when she went door-to-door with a petition to have the holiday rescinded. (She apparently did not get the required number of signatures.) Anna Jarvis died a few years later, blind, almost deaf, nearly penniless, and as her New York Times obituary put it, a "bitter opponent of the encroachment of commercialism into the observance." But while Miss Jarvis may have lost the battle against Mother's Day in her lifetime, her story lives on — because she kind of had a point: We are mothers, hear us roar! We shouldn't let our families get off so easy. Mother's Day is not a one-day panacea for 12 months of taking everything we do for granted. This year, I'm not letting my husband and kids get away with it — at least, not without a nice handwritten letter.
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