I have a modest proposal, one which requires no realignment of national priorities, no exhaustive jury trial, no international intervention. It may, however, make greeting card companies and florists angry.
Abolish Mother’s Day.
The idea for the modern Mother’s Day began when Anna Jarvis of Grafton, WV, held a memorial in 1907 for her mother who had passed away two years earlier. According to Wikipedia, thereafter Jarvis began to lobby the make Mother’s Day a national event and was successful in 1914. But by the 1920s she was soured by the commercialization of the holiday.
According to her New York Times obituary, Jarvis (who died a spinster) once said: “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother – and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.”
I too am soured by the over-the-top commercialization of Mother’s Day. But my real reason for abolishing it is more because of the blurring of roles in today’s society and not because I think one is lazy for sending a store-bought card over a handwritten note.
Perhaps it was simpler in Ms. Jarvis’s day. But now which category of mothers do we honor? The nuclear family mother? The adoptive mother? The foster care mother? The stepmother? The mother-in-law? Each of these categories deserves recognition, but they overlap. The stepmother, for example, often has to share the day with the biological mother. The grandmother shares time with her daughter, who could be a mother in her own right. Who honors whom? Who cooks Sunday dinner?
Additionally with families becoming more splintered and traditional male and female roles becoming less delineated, should a stay-at-home Dad get breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day?
The retort could be that we honor all people who are “mothers” on the second Sunday in May. Greeting card companies seem to be taking this all-inclusive route, since we now have Mother’s Day cards for various sub-categories such as “aunt” and “special person.” I have nothing against mothers or aunts or special people; but, in my mind this adds to the opportunities for commercialism more than it does anything else.
When I mentioned my proposal to a friend, she said: “I suppose you’d want to eliminate Father’s Day too.”
Well . . .
When Roger and I were first married, our only “child” was Leonard, the cat. On our first Mothers’ Day as a married couple, he gave me a card from Leonard with the verse, “You have been like a mother to me.” Whatever works . . .