Mother's Day

I have been thinking about Mothers Day lately.

Typically on Mother's Day I go into "martyr thinking". My dear and devoted husband wouldn't know romance if it bit him on the butt so generally speaking, I don't get anything. I might get something if I whine about how I didn't get anything, but then it feels like he's just doing it to get me to shut up so it doesn't mean anything.

Yesterday I got to thinking about the purpose of Mother's Day. What is it? Well, of course, everyone knows that it is a day to honor mothers. To show them how much you appreciate them, right?

Why do I need/want one day every year to celebrate being a mother? One day to know that i am appreciated by those whom I care for? ONE DAY? You have to be kidding me. I started rethinking that. I don't want ONE day. I want to know I am appreciated every day. I don't need a diamond ring or a piece of paper that tells me that. I need to look at my family in a different way. I need to see the ways that they tell me they love me EVERY SINGLE DAY!

So, I started yesterday.

My first "Mother's Day" was marked by the fact that my two beautiful, very social daughters who are unschooled (and since we haven't had a car in several weeks we haven't been able to make it to local meetings) turned down playing with the local schooled neighborhood kids (whom they have been playing with every day for the last 2+ weeks, might I add so they aren't not getting *any* social interaction right now) to make slime with their mom. What a compliment to hear them tell the kids to go home because they are doing a project with mom. It warmed my heart.

You can see the results of our science project at

http://365daysofsparkle.blogspot.com

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So, after thinking about all this, I had to look up Mother's Day on wikipedia and got to learn the history of Mother's Day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother's_Day

Here is some interesting information on it...

At first, it was to honor the Gods in Roman and Greek times. Here's how it came about in the US.

The United States celebrates Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Mother's Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.

When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on 10 May 1908, in the church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Originally the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, this building is now the International Mother's Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on — spreading eventually to 45 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother's Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother's Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States.

So much for that idea, lol!