A Different Mother's Day

And a call to creative resistance

In my growing-up years in Florida, it was customary to give one’s mother a wrist corsage that she could proudly wear to church on Mother’s Day. This was not necessarily easy. In May, those flowers had to be more or less continuously refrigerated and be hidden from the mothers at the same time. We told ourselves that they would just never think to look behind the milk. 

In a way, the effort was the whole point. Our mothers had done so much for us. A corsage was the least we could do in return. Today, little has changed. We don’t buy corsages much any more, but church is still an important place to celebrate Mother’s Day. At our church, it is common to have all the mothers stand and receive a round of applause. 

And mothers do, in fact, do a lot. In my own years of mothering, there have been an awful lot of dinners cooked and tears dried, long days and sleepless nights. I am not averse to being thanked. If you gave me a corsage, I would wear it. Why, then, don’t I love Mother’s Day?

First, the way we celebrate, the gift-giving and adulation, creates not just a celebration of mothers, but also a sharp divide between women who are mothers and women who aren’t–something that women who are not mothers tend to be mostly keenly aware of. I know that when I was living through the grief of infertility, I certainly was. 

Perhaps even worse is the experience of those who are sort-of mothers, who are mothers in a complicated way. Am I a mother if my only child is now being raised in an adoptive family? Am I a mother if my only child died before birth? What if no one but me even knew about that child? There are more women than you might guess for whom the invitation to “stand if you are a mother” is a painful one. And then there are those with complicated or difficult relationships with their own mothers, or those who hardly knew their mothers at all. How should they take part in this holiday at the center of everyone’s attention?

And besides all that, there is the enormous consumerism at the heart of it all, so familiar now that we hardly notice it. This year, we in the U.S. will spend $33.5 billion on Mother’s Day, with the average expenditure per person ringing in at just over $250. For the record, with that amount of money, we could end hunger in the U.S. And have plenty left over. 

That would certainly better reflect Mother’s Day as it was originally envisioned. Mother’s Day began with Ann Reeves Jarvis, an Appalachian mother and a lifelong activist. Jarvis fought to lower the infant mortality rate by giving mothers the education and assistance they needed. During the Civil War, she organized women’s brigades among both Union and Confederate mothers, encouraging them to help the wounded of either side. After the war, she proposed a Mothers’ Friendship Day to promote peace between those the war had divided.

After Jarvis’s death in 1905, her daughter Anna sought to honor her mother’s life and work, and campaigned for a day focused on honoring individual mothers. (Hence, Mother’s Day is spelled with the singular, not the plural.) It worked. In 1914, Congress passed a law proclaiming the second Sunday in May to be Mother's Day. 

It was not the holiday Anna had hoped for, though. Almost immediately, it was engulfed by commercial interests. Anna had suggested white carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, as the emblem for her holiday. When she saw florists suddenly hiking the price for that particular flower every May, though, she joined in a boycott against them. In 1923, she crashed a retail confectioner convention to protest that industry’s economic gouging in connection with Mother’s Day. “There is no connection between candy and this day. It is pure commercialization,” she said. By the 1940s, Anna Jarvis campaigned against the holiday itself, lobbying Congress to reverse their decision and remove it from the calendar. In that endeavor, she was not so successful. And so, a century later, here we are.

Anna Jarvis. Getty Images.

It raises a larger question. What do you do when you find yourself in the midst of a practice that has strayed so far from what it was intended to be? What do you do when you notice that you yourself are part of something that has been taken up by forces much larger than yourself and made into something you do not choose? You can run in the opposite direction. You can sigh and recall that life is complicated and continue on with your day. Both of these have their moments. Most often, though, something else is called for. Less impressive (and generally less immediately satisfying) than renunciation but also harder than looking away, sometimes the answer is creative resistance. 

Creative resistance is an art more than a science, but it draws from a reliable set of ingredients. Two of the most important are these: naming the good and taking a step (often just a small step) that honors that good. 

This Mother’s Day, it might lead to questions like these:

• Where could we honor Ann Jarvis by imitating her? 

• Where is the well-being of the children in our own communities endangered?

• Where do we see the mothers of war, mourning losses that we can only imagine? What would it mean for us to mourn with those who mourn? What would it mean to work for justice and peace?

• Who are the mothers in our own communities, fighting invisible “wars” and losing hope? How could we stand alongside them? `

• How could we invite others to tend to the wounded, even the wounded of their enemies?

• How could we imitate Anna Jarvis, who wanted to honor her own mother? 

• Where have our mothers done quiet work that deserves celebration?

• What forms of celebration focus on connection and joy more than production and consumption?

• Leaning into the “creativity” of creative resistance: are there possibilities that actually combine some of these seemingly disparate goods of Mother’s Day?

• What if we focused not as much on who is in and who is out, but rather on a day of celebration that allows us to come together in this sort of work?

This is not always easy. The work of creative resistance requires care, and we may do it clumsily. All of that is fine. As any mother will tell you, a handmade card’s imperfections are part of a beautiful effort. Our mothers knew the corsages were behind the milk all along. What matters is the love. 

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And before I go:

You may want to read Memorializing Motherhood, which tells the whole story of Anna Jarvis and the history of Mother’s Day.

Have a listen: Joan Baez’s peacemaking anthem, All the Weary Mothers.

Finally, a few starter thoughts if you want to reclaim Mother’s Day from commercialization.