MAY MUSINGS

May brings flowers, gardening, pools opening, the end of school … and Mother's Day.

My mother always hated Mother's Day. She told her four kids she'd kill the first one of us who brought her a flower and expected her to wear it in public as a badge of ser-vitude. An assertive feminist, she was sickened by the nicey-nicey smiles of other families treating their mothers out for a single meal when the rest of the year, my mother was sure, they went unthanked, unappreciated, unrecognized. It was not enough.

We gave Momma cards and presents, but no corsages, you better believe it.

I think if my mother had known where it came from, who invented it and why, she would have felt differently about Mother's Day. Even though we were a Unitarian Universalist family, we were unaware of the day's origins: created by a Unitarian woman who believed if all women united to insist on peace, they could bring an end to war.

Julie Ward Howe was best known for her enormous success writing the bloodthirsty "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as a rallying song for Union soldiers in the Civil War. However, as an active war volunteer, seeing hospitals and battle sites, nursing maimed and dying soldiers, and visiting their bereaved families, Howe gradually turned from the militancy expressed in her famous song. After the war she poured effort into working for women's suffrage, equal rights, and world peace. And she thought peace could only be achieved by women, specifically mothers: Howe believed that mothers, through the acts of bearing and nurturing children, share a cherishing of life and grief at its loss that transcends national lines.

"Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?" she wrote. "Arise… Christian women of this day! As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women on this day leave the duties of hearth and home to set out in the work of peace."

Beginning in 1870, Howe established a Mother's Day for Peace, June 2. This she envisioned as a day for all women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. But the idea of Mother's Day didn't catch on nationally until after 1907 when Anna Jarvis proposed it in a less challenging form. And, as my mother would say, it's been downhill ever since - especially in recent commercializing.

But we don't have to surrender the field. I believe, in spite of my mother's dire threats, that it is nice to recognize and thank our mothers on Mother's Day - with or without corsages. But we also can, and should, celebrate it as a day of peace. A day for us all to embrace what Julia Ward Howe thought mothers clearly understood - and some of this will sound familiar: the sanctity of life, the inherent worth and dignity of each individual, and the interdependent web of which we are a part.

Happy Mother's Day!--Love, Mary K.