I’ll Blame it on the Ny-Quil

Last week some flu bug invaded my body on Monday evening and took up residence for the week. I attempted all the duties on the docket, swigging ny-quil as often as I could thinking that would evict the flu from my body. I’m not sure how good of a job it did on the flu, but that ny-quil left me with such a strange coma that I am just getting out from under that ny-quil cloud.

Last weekend I went from morning nap to mid-to-late-morning nap, congestion, night sweats, and, well, I don’t think I need to relay all the prosaic details of the week. But it was a week in which I chaperoned the first prom at KA but also kept looking for when my next nap could be.

Anyway, it was not a great week for composing blog entries. The ny-quil malaise left me so uninspired and unmotivated (naptime yet?) that all the words just left me…
But as we leave May behind tonight, I did muster a little energy to think about one of my untended ideas from the month, and it makes for a nice coda for May, especially on a Memorial Day May 31st.

This month I thought about Mother’s Day on and off.

Maybe because I nearly forgot about it on the actual day three weeks ago. Jordan celebrates Mother’s Day in March, and since Sundays are school days here anyway, I remember at bedtime on May 9 wondering how I had forgotten to call friends/loved ones who are mothers. The day just didn’t dawn on me throughout the day. Of course once you lose your mother, Mother’s Day is always a little more wistful anyway.

I remember the story of a friend whose church celebrated Mother’s Day in a poignant way. One wore a red rose in honor of a living mother and a white rose in memory of a mother. Each would help the other pin the rose to their clothing - one red, one white - each carrying in their hearts their mothers, one here, the other on a farther shore and in a greater light. Thus flowered and empowered by love, parishioners helped celebrate the power of mothers among the rose-decorated parishioners . . . each literally wearing on their hearts, their love, or their grief, or their memories.

Mother's Day can be complicated and conflicted, fraught and freighted: for the mother whose child has died; for the child whose mother has died; for the one who gave up her child for adoption; for the child given up for adoption; for the family whose mother is not a good mother. Mother's Day can be fraught and freighted. Or it can also be gentle and good. Somehow this month, by practically missing Mother’s Day, I thought about it far longer than I might. I thought about how complicated Mother’s Day can be.

Welcome to planet earth and to the life among humans. We are a complicated lot: by turns tender and sentimental, principled and practical, quirky and scratchy, cynical and suspicious, broken and breaking. The other day when I had little energy I decided I needed to do a little research on Mother’s Day (again, I almost missed the day and somehow became a bit obsessed the rest of the month about it!) and I discovered who is really behind the origin of Mother’s Day.

If you know much about how complicated history can be, there are several sides to the origin of Mother's Day, one rather benign, and one weighted with a bit more controversy…hmmm…like most things in U. S. History (by the way, did you know Helen Keller had some controversial socialist leanings? We like to suppress the things that are a little edgy…).

So the benign story is that a woman missed her mother and so petitioned the government for a holiday honoring mothers. Sounds plausible…but also about 50 years later than when Julia Ward Howe urged the United States for Mother’s Day. Wait…Julia Ward Howe…the name rings a bell…yes, she wrote the words to the Civil War anthem, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Was this supposed to be a corsage and luncheon holiday? Hardly.

Dear friends, allow me to introduce a Port key. In the world of Harry Potter, the Port key is an enchanted object that carries you to a specific location. Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870 is a Port key. To touch it is to be transported to a room, a great, grand room in a universe parallel to this one. It is a room in which mothers from around the world have gathered (can you see them: kimonos, saris, burqas, ponchos, Lederhosen, aprons?) Can you hear the tinkle and jingle of jewelry?

They are in congress, these mothers. They are gathered in solemn assembly. They are gathered for “a great and earnest day of counsel.” They are conspiring together to make peace. They are scheming about how to rid the world of war. They have locked the doors; they have locked the men out. This is a mothers-only assembly. The room is filled with mothers whose beloved sons disappeared to war and never returned. It is filled with mother's whose sons marched off to war hale and whole, bursting with pride and courage, but who returned bloodied, bent, broken and forever altered.

The room is filled with mothers for whom war is not nobility but brutality, not triumph but torment, not victory but the very definition of failure.

Julia Ward Howe was a mother of seven. She penned her defiant proclamation after her son, Sam’s, death in the carnage of the Civil War. She penned it as a radical abolitionist who cherished the aims and ends of the Civil War—who supported the Civil War and who wrote its most stirring summons to arms, the Battle Hymn of the Republic about the grapes of wrath. She cherished the purpose of that war, but its means chastened and sobered her. She penned it as a mother battled-scarred and grieving (not only over what Confederate sons did to their Union brothers, but also over what Union sons did to their Confederate brothers). It was penned by a mother who dared challenge the alliance of war and patriotism and who disagreed that a soldier's prowess could be measured in the number of enemy he killed.

This is America's underground Mother's Day. It was born, not as a call to arms, but as a call to disarm. Not as a battle cry, but as a mother's wracking sobs.
How interesting to contemplate this original intention of Mother’s Day on Memorial Day.

Harry Truman in 1945 proclaimed the second Sunday in May as a day to “acknowledge anew our gratitude, love, and devotion to the mothers of America . . . “ The truth is that Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day lives in a parallel universe to Harry Truman's. Howe's Mother's Day is underground, clandestine, because a nation like ours can hardly abide it. We cannot abide it in full view I daresay. We cannot abide it as a nation because it was in its day and remains today an open and defiant challenge to our national assumption that patriotism and militarism are inextricably bound.

I have a heart for both Mother's Days: the one which honors mothers; the other imagines women from the world gathered in earnest and solemn counsel to foment peace.

Let this be a deep, complicated and important day . . . as deep and complicated and important as our lives as sons and daughters, as our lives as mothers and fathers, as our lives as men and women, as our lives as citizens both of this nation and of God’s whole wide world.

Red in honor of your mother. White, in her memory.

Red, for revolution. White, for peace.

Either. Both.

Happy Mother's Day! Happy Memorial Day!
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MOTHERS DAY PROCLAMATION
by Julia Ward Howe (1870)

Arise then ... women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace ...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

God bless my mother; all I am or hope to be I owe to her. —Abraham Lincoln