Mother's Day

      Sunday, May 10th, we will celebrate Mother's Day 2015 - a national holiday to honor Mother's that has the following history taken from wikipedia and I quote:

"The modern American holiday of Mother's Day was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother in Grafton, West Virginia. Her campaign to make "Mother's Day" a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her beloved mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Anna’s mission was to honor her own mother by continuing work she started and to set aside a day to honor mothers, "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world". Anna's mother, Ann Jarvis, was a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the Civil War and created Mother’s Day Work Clubs to address public health issues.
Due to the campaign efforts of Anna Jarvis, several states officially recognized Mother's Day, the first in 1910 being West Virginia, Jarvis’ home state. Jarvis' push to create an official holiday was met with opposition by some. Sen. Henry Moore Teller described the notion of Mother's Day as "absolutely absurd," and "trifling." In 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation creating Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.
Although Jarvis was successful in founding Mother's Day she soon became resentful of the commercialization and was angry that companies would profit from the holiday. By the early 1920s, Hallmark and other companies started selling Mother's Day cards. Jarvis became so embittered by what she saw as misinterpretation and exploitation that she protested and even tried to rescind Mother's Day. The holiday that she worked so hard for was supposed to be about sentiment, not about profit. Jarvis's intention for the holiday had been for people to appreciate and honor mothers by writing a personal letter, by hand, expressing love and gratitude, rather than buying gifts and pre-made cards. Jarvis organized boycotts and threatened lawsuits to try to stop the commercialization. She crashed a candymakers' convention in Philadelphia in 1923. Two years later she protested at a confab of the American War Mothers, which raised money by selling carnations, the flower associated with Mother’s Day, and was arrested for disturbing the peace.
Jarvis's holiday was adopted by other countries and it is now celebrated all over the world." End quote.

     I'll have to say that I agree with Ms. Javis' assessment - but this holiday is not the only one tainted by the greed of money hungry companies that pull your heart strings because they have learned to do that so well and have become extremely rich doing it.

     There could be an argument made that Mothers are the most influencing factor in most people's lives.  After all, we each are made within our Mother's bodies, we develop and grow and then enter the world through her labor, pain and effort.  But, that is not the definition of a Mother any more than the sperm donor being the definition of a Father.  So, while it may be true that Mother's carry a huge influence on our lives, it is not because of the physical connection of the act of childbirth.

     Mother's are made when a loving bond is formed between two hearts........When a child attaches themselves to a woman's heart, in any form, and a woman attaches themselves to a child's heart, in any form,  a Mother is born.  I do believe God intended it this way.  Actually, if you go back to the story in the Bible of the Garden of Eden, becoming a Mother in the traditional sense - giving physical birth to a child - was a punishment pronounced on Eve and all women to follow for breaking God's commandment.  Doesn't sound like a very loving situation in that sense does it?

     My Mother was my biological Mother in the sense that I came to be her child through the womb growing, painful birthing method.  But, she was so much more...........

     My Mother had a hard life compared to most.  She grew up in a loving family - they worked hard to eek out a living on the land, farming, growing and harvesting as the weather allowed.  She only had an eighth grade education - the idea being that most women would not need education because they would have a husband later in life to provide the monetary needs.  An education was seen as a waste of time for girls when they could be home helping in the fields.  Her father had diabetes and in those days there was not a lot of knowledge about correct treatment, so he died when he was quite young, as was my mother.  Her mother took over the running of the farm and the carrying on of the family with the help of her sons.   All the children, including my mother, were taught that life was hard, but when the going got tough you didn't give up, you kept going.  They were a God-fearing, church going, Christian family - the kind of family that was the original backbone of this nation......sad to say we've come a long way from that now.  They were the rule, not the exception unlike today when it seems to be just the opposite.

    She ran away and married my father - her family forbidding the union because of age and need for her help on the farm.  She regretted it from the first day......  My father was a hard man..strict, demanding, hard to love.  But my mother had been so ingrained with the idea that you took the cards you were dealt and made the best of them that she forged ahead.  She was a farm wife who never got a thank you, a gift, even an act of kindness from her husband for 25 years.  Her life consisted of trying to meet the many demands laid on her by my father daily and the raising of five children.  We were a church going family and my father was a deacon and a highly respected man of the church because, unfortunately, the church didn't know the real man the way his family did.  When I was ten years old, my father grew tired of the boring life of a farmer and decided he needed a change - a mistress, a different job, a different town and a completely different way of life that excluded church.  So my mother was tossed aside like a rag doll and left to her fend for herself.  I always loved my mother and was proud of her, but I guess this is the time of her life that I will always remember her as being one of the strongest women I would ever know.  Amidst unfathomable odds, she reinvented herself.  She walked into the bank in our small town and boldly asked for a loan - on her own signature.  She had nothing to offer.  Just her word.  She asked for money to buy a used car, to rent a house and to keep her afloat until she could get a job at a local factory doing the only thing she knew how to do - sew.  The bank gave her the loan on her word only.  My older sister taught her how to drive.  She got the sewing job, rented a house and moved the remains of her family to town, starting all over again.

     Most mothers don't have it that hard......many others have it harder.  But there is a common thread that runs through all mothers of all types........they would lay down their life in a heartbeat for the safety and welfare of their child....that child to which their heart bonded in love many years before.  See, there's something every mother knows.  That card that their child makes for them that is smeared with extra paint, has messy writing and sometimes just has their name means more to them than 10,000 commercially printed and sold cards.  THAT is the one that will be kept for years to come, will go in the scrapbook or the memory box or the drawer that holds the special items that speak to a mother's heart.

So, yes, Mrs. Jarvis, there will be a lot of flowers and cakes and commercially sold cards this Mother's Day and a lot of people will make a lot of money off those things.  But you were wrong about one thing - the bond between a heart-connected Mother and child will never be commercialized.  Because the most important thing to that Mother on this Mother's Day and EVERYDAY is the knowledge that their child loves them.  No amount of money in the world can purchase that bond.