Mother’s Day is for mothers, don’t you think?
So for Mother’s Day I sent my mom a card and a gift. I’ll call her.
One thing I will not do is shower my wife with gifts and flowers and cards and so on, because she’s not my mother, although she is a mom.
Despite the persistence of men who call their wives “Mother” and “Mommy,” I think we all can agree that conflating mothers and wives is not such a good thing. In fact, that is a little creepy.
But the whole Mother’s Day extravaganza increasingly seems to revolve around men honoring their wives.
There’s the breakfast in bed and the flowers. The brunch. There might be a wrapped present from hubby. Invariably there will be a card.
I understand the rationale: “My wife is a fantastic mother to our children, and it’s the duty of the entire family to honor her on this one special day every year.”
And that’s cool. But when it becomes more about hubby fluttering around his wife than it is about the little ‘uns honoring their mom, then something has gone awry.
I don’t think there’s anything strange about the couples who engage in husband-wife Mother’s Day celebrations. I think they’ve just been caught up in the marketing vortex that is attached to the holiday.
And as with so many holidays, the marketeers have twisted the central idea – in this case, mothers are important and worthy of holiday sanctification – into an event that hinges on the opening of wallets and that relies upon guilt for muscle. Little kids, after all, can’t drop a bunch of dough on Momma. But Dad? He’d better.
Labor Day, Memorial Day and Thanksgiving have somehow managed to preserve a balance of their animating spirits. Work, sacrifice and the counting of blessings all are worthwhile objects of celebration, and these holidays have not morphed into commercial grotesques.
But Valentine’s Day, which, in theory, hinges on love, has become a carnival of Cupids, chocolate cornucopias, exorbitant rose bouquets and pricey flutes of saccharine champagne.
The holiday may not be salvageable as a cultural phenomenon, although individuals are free to rescue it in their different ways.
Mother’s Day has not quite reached Valentine’s Day proportions of substance decay, but it is getting there.
Mother’s Day, for example, is the most popular day of the year to dine out, according to the National Restaurant Association.
Yet in the United States, the holiday was born out of the Civil and the Franco- Prussian wars, and had nothing to do with a flower-spangled brunch.
Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870, a call to arms for women to spread pacifism. She toiled – unsuccessfully – to formally establish a “Mother’s Day for Peace” in the U.S.
From the Proclamation:
Say firmly:
We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
This is pretty serious stuff.
Eventually, through the efforts of a mother-daughter tag-team (Ann and Anna Jarvis, respectively), what became the United Methodist Church hosted the first Mother’s Day celebration, in Grafton, W.Va., in 1908. The town is home to the International Mother’s Day Shrine.
It became an official U.S. holiday in 1914, and the commercial accoutrements latched on quickly.
What’s Mother’s Day today? A festival of pampering. It’s an inward-looking holiday, not a trumpet-blaring proclamation of the intrinsic value of mothers to society and the world, but an opportunity to let Mom rest for a spell.
Nothing wrong with a little coddling, but the holiday has such potential for so much more. Mothers offer nurturing, safety, strength, understanding, emotional intimacy and love. Mothers possess an instinct for protection and deep care. Mothers are truly awesome.
Maybe a reading aloud of the Mother’s Day Proclamation before the beginning of the fancy brunch would be a good start.
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
