Mother’s Day. First started when Julie Ward Howe issued the Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870 for disarmament. However, it didn’t take off until 1908 when Anna Jarvis waned a way to honor her mother’s dream. It took off after she enlisted John Wanamaker and herself promoted until President Woodrow Wilson made it an official holiday in 1914.
My husband calls it the Hallmark Holiday, one pushed by mass retailers and Madison Avenue to force people into a frenzy of flowers, cards, phone calls, gifts, etc. You get the picture. I really don’t care if I get gifts. Just being able to sit with my boys and enjoy time with them is truly all I want. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t say no to a new Macbook Pro, but in the end, Mother’s Day to me is time to reflect and just be.
Dove tweeted earlier asking what we had learned from our Mother’s. Mine was simple. She taught me to be strong, even when I am at the weakest point in my life; her guidance, her strength, fills me and is always there. It’s certainly been needed over the last months and I’m more grateful for her than she will ever know. Not only for life, but for the lessons I use in my everyday life.
I’m also thinking about my mother-in-law. She is not a person I will ever understand and I don’t expect to. Just knowing the hardships she went through, living in occupied Korea, forced to forsake the Korean language for Japanese, the Korean War, orphaned at a young age. It’s enough to make any mother’s heart ache for her and the childhood that was essentially destroyed due to hate.
Today, I’m also thinking about Emili. My heart. My partner in Mommyality. She is at a different age and stage in rearing Puddin and sometimes, I forget what it’s like to have a child that young. One so dependent on everything. Our wish is to live with our yards backing up to each other, with a workshop in the middle of the yards…right on the property line. Something mod, with a little kitchen and fantastic coffee. But, today, she is on my mind, thinking about her and the stage she is in and all I can do is send her all of my strength from a distance and hope that her just knowing I’m doing so helps make her day a little easier.
Finally? My friend Sara. We discussed parenting yesterday in a gorgeous garden, with the koi pond in the background. She never had biological children, but had a child come into her life that she loved as her child. Who has given her a grandchild. That is love. I know many women who have done that and they are the best mothers I know and it’s my hope I can be half the Mother they are.
Finally, my thoughts, prayers and all go out to all of the Mother’s in the world. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you have loved a child, you are a Mother…even if you have never given birth. Cherish yourself today.
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