Mother's Day

My very first Mother's Day 1992



Today is mother's day and according to Wikepedia, Mother's Day is...
The United States celebrates Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Mother's Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on 10 May 1908, in the church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Originally the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, this building is now the International Mother's Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on — spreading eventually to 45 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother's Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions."

Now, I don't know about uniting against war outside the occasional bickering I've had to disrupt. And I am all for peace and quiet and against any 'weapons' they may use on one another...like the bopper sword Pat made at a day long program at MIT.
As for sanitation ... I find myself today sanitizing the counter where someone made waffles last night and then someone else made brownies. I've put to work the masses this morning in unstacking the dishes so I could sanitize the sink and then rallied the troops in getting out the lawnmower so the jungle (lawn) can be tamed and trimmed!

Mother's Day is today though, and its a day that I have found myself with baby books and tissues, looking back on those early years when I held those swaddled little ones in my arms. Those precious little bundles who gave me the opportunity to be called in sweet little voices "Mama, Mommy,and Mom"




Mom and Sam 1993






Mom and Pat 1991








Mom and Meri 1995

Today we spent the day together as a family. We went in to town to see the closing of "West Side Story" and then had a fun dinner at Fire and Ice with my parents, my sisters, my father in law and my nieces.

While I miss those early years that seem so much more simple now than they did then, I truly enjoy the camaraderie I share with them and listening to their ideas and thoughts.