Go back to 1870 and read suffragette Julia Ward Howe’s manifesto “The Mother’s Day Proclamation.” It’s an audacious and revolutionary piece of writing that resonates equally with  her more popular effort, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” While the Hymn to our Republic has been her primary legacy, its use as both a malevolent threat and inspiring ode to perseverance has weakened its importance. “The Mother’s Day Proclamation” is thrilling, even after 152 years:

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them

of clarity, mercy, and patience.”

One can feel the force of this proclamation as if expressed today and feel assured that not much of the urgency has dissipated over these seven score and twelve years (to phrase the passage of time as Lincoln did in “The Gettysburg Address.”)  Mothers are teachers. They are visionaries, the main providers of mercy and forgiveness, and the repositories of infinite patience for all our transgressions. They are flawed and sacrificial lambs and they are in it for the duration/ Howe continues:

“From the Bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own…Dis-arm, Dis-arm! 

The sword is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor…”

Temperance activist Juliet Calhoun Blakely called for a Mother’s Day in the 1870’s. The duo of Mary Towles Sasseen and Frank Herring advocated for a Mother’s Day in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

The crass commercialism that quickly came of Mother’s Day after President Woodrow Wilson declared it a holiday in 1914 proved bitter fruit for Anna Jarvis, the eventually credited force behind the holiday’s founding. By 1920, Jarvis started an apparently one woman campaign to end the holiday she so tirelessly lobbied to create. The campaign lasted until her death in 1948. Jarvis had disavowed the holiday altogether and spent much of her time mired in lawsuits against groups that used the name “Mother’s Day” for commercial purposes. She wanted Mother’s Day to be completely erased from the American calendar. 

Flash forward to the here and now. Commercialism of Mother’s Day has outpaced even Christmas (because of its innocuous nonsecular appeal) with feverish sales of flowers and boxes of candies,……and multitudes of strained Sunday brunches. Mothers everywhere are treated like queens. And speaking of queens, across the Atlantic, Queen Elizabeth II will be celebrating her motherhood as she too cares for her children and grandkids including her out of control ones.

If words fail us when we think of the word mother, we can move beyond the noun form to the verb. Who is best suited to mother a child? What tools are needed to mother an infant into adulthood and beyond? When does mothering end? Expanding the grammatical concept of “mother” does not minimize the celebration of women who give birth but rather defines the selfless caring of one human being for another human being beyond the physical to the spiritual. Think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a suffragette leader and mother of eight who gave everything to those children and the cause of women’s rights. Her life spanned from 1815-1902, less than twenty years before the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Think of Erin Maye Quade, a Minnesota State Senate candidate who went into labor on April 23, 2022 while delivering a convention speech. Her male opponent did not think to postpone the debate, only serving to prove that the persistence of motherhood is limitless.

While parades are not a standard way of celebrating Mother’s Day in the United States, Boston’s Duckling Day Parade, a fixture in the city for over thirty years, tells the story of a mother’s love in the animal kingdom. Inspired by the 1941 Rober McCloskey book Make Way For Ducklings, children dress as ducklings and friendly police officers as they trace Mrs. Mallard’s journey from the river where her ducklings are born to across the highway to the Public Gardens. She’s taught them all they need to know to function as ducks, so now they need to survive the journey across the highway towards adulthood. The symbolism is not lost on readers young and old. You need to cross the road to reach the other side, and your mother’s love always get you where you need to go.

Society finallly embraces the natural law that all human beings mother, nurture, care, teach and love. Embrace all who mother. Let them know their mothering matters. If they’re gone, embrace their memory. Coddle the mother inside you . On Mother’s Day. And everyday.

SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.