Mother's Day Sensitivity

In my fifty-one years of ministry, beginning as a youth minister in the summer of 1975 at Riverside Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, I have learned how sensitive holidays can be for people. While we appreciate the opportunity to celebrate special days, they can be reminders of loss or regret or other complicated feelings that can diminish the spirit of celebration and joy. Valentine’s Day is one such conflicted holiday for many. Mother’s Day is another. 

Mother’s Day is celebrated on differing days in the more than 40 countries that recognize it, and many of the varied celebrations world-wide are held in the spring. The precursor to Mother’s Day in the United States occurred on June 2, 1872, when abolitionist, Julia Ward Howe, author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” called for women to join in support of disarmament in a “Mother’s Day for Peace.” Her appeal to women throughout the world, the “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” spelled out her intent to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, and the great and general interests of peace. It was celebrated annually in Boston and other locations for about thirty years. 

It was a daughter’s effort in 1908, to honor her mother’s dream of establishing an annual day of rest for mothers, that led to the Mother’s Day we now celebrate in the US on the second Sunday of May. Anna Jarvis created Mother's Day to honor her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, who was a remarkable woman.  

Anna Jarvis

The International Mother’s Day Shrine was designated a National Historic Landmark October 5,1992.

Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, the “mother church” of Mother’s Day, was incorporated as the International Mother’s Day Shrine on May 15, 1962, as a shrine to all mothers.

Ann Reeves Jarvis was the mother of between eleven and thirteen children according to various accounts, only four of whom lived to adulthood. She was a social activist who channeled her significant grief into public service. She worked to improve the unsanitary living conditions in her area. She raised funds for medicine, nursed sick neighbors suffering from tuberculosis, and advocated for clean water and safer sewage disposal.

Ann Reeves Jarvis who, like Julia Ward Howe, was an advocate for peace, started Mother’s Day Work Clubs to care equally for Union and Confederate Soldiers, opening her own home to the sick and wounded from both sides. After the Civil War, she organized a Mothers’ Friendship Day in Pruntytown, West Virginia, then the county seat, drawing some 5,000 veterans from the opposing armies and skillfully orchestrated a day that, at its end, had neighbors singing together, “Auld Lang Syne.”

Olive Ricketts, executive director of the Anna Jarvis Birthplace Museum in Webster, West Virginia, says, “Ann Reeves Jarvis did things like this over and over throughout her life. If I was going to be like anybody in the world, I would be like her. She could get people to do the right thing.”

Including her own daughter, Anna Jarvis, to be so inspired by her mother’s life that she went to great lengths to establish the holiday that her mother so wanted. Her mother had once said, “I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mother’s day, commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life, for she is entitled to it.” 

 On May 10, 1908, Anna Jarvis organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, the church where her mother had worshipped and served for thirty years. She also sought the support of many, including the World’s Sunday School Association in 1910, which helped to ensure the holiday’s success. 

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill designating the second Sunday in May as a legal holiday to be called “Mother’s Day”—dedicated “to the best mother in the world, your mother.” His sentiment suited the simplicity that Anna Jarvis hoped for in keeping with her mother’s wishes: recognition of and appreciation for all the sacrifices that mothers make, celebrated by a day of true relaxation and rest.

In short order, Mother’s Day became commercialized, causing much consternation for Anna Jarvis, who regretted having ever helped establish the holiday that had lost its original intent. In our day the trend is perhaps to turn back to that intent, as we are encouraged to focus more on experiences with our mothers than gifts for them. 

The history of Mother’s Day in our country and how it has come to be celebrated in commercialized rather than personal ways, is but one of the complications of the day. For some the day is tender because their mothers have died, and the grief is still raw, no matter how long ago the loss. For others the day is difficult because they did not have a mother present in their lives at all or in the way that they needed them. For still others the day can be a reminder to women who wanted to experience pregnancy and know the joy of childbirth, or to adopt a child, but for a number of different reasonswere not able to do so. 

Others find the day difficult because of child loss and the painful void that always creates, even if other children help in the healing process. And some mothers experience the pain in being estranged from adult children whom they yearn for and pray to be united with again.

Thankfully, Mother’s Day is not so complex for all mothers and their children. Many will  enjoy sharing happy memories of days gone by, or making happy memories to cherish in the days ahead on Mother’s Day. Children will proudly bring home handmade gifts from school to express their devotion, and there will be many mothers who enjoy breakfast in bed or a day off from their usual chores. 

But it seems helpful to me to also acknowledge that all around us there are people for whom the day involves a tenderness that might benefit from our sensitivity and kindness. 

Mothers at their best are like Ann Reeves Jarvis, for whom Mother’s Day in our nation was founded. They are the sorts of people who can inspire others to do the right thing, working to improve the world and to promote peace. But all mothers are human and not always at their best, which is why it is important to be sensitive and supportive on this day that is, according to President Woodrow Wilson, “dedicated to the best mother in the world, your mother.”  

And for those who are grieving the loss of a mother, or struggling emotionally with a mother, or wishing they might experience motherhood, or bereft of a child, or estranged from a child, I pray that we all may show healing compassion on Mother’s Day because holidays can be sensitive.  And so can we.