The modern commercialized celebration of gifts, flowers and candy, bears little resemblance to Julia Ward Howe‘s original idea. Here is the Proclamation that explains, in her own powerful words, the goals of the original Mother’s Day in the United States…
Portrait drawing of poet, antislavery activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe.
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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 bosom 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 -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
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To all mothers and children of mothers, wishes of strength, peace and hope for this Mother’s Day.
Garry and I lost a good friend today. Pastor Stan Vanderklay was one of the Pastors at our church, Pleasant Street Christian Reformed Church and was the interim Senior Pastor during the Church’s long search for a permanent new Pastor. Above all, Stan was our friend.
Yesterday we were swapping emails and puns with Stan. He had a great sense of humor and was particularly fond of puns. Today, without warning, while having lunch with a friend, he passed out and died.
A friend and a companion, he presided over our last vow renewal. We will miss him very much. We already do.
Someone asked me to write about whether or not I wish I’d acted less from my brain and more from my heart in relationships.
Au contraire, my friends. I fervently wish I’d used more brain and less of everything else.When I look at the big picture, I’m not sure there was any difference between “thinking with my heart” and not thinking at all.
Men are accused of being in thrall to lust, but women are no less irrational when chemistry takes over. Women’s behavior may be more subtle (or not), but sexual attraction — old-fashioned lust — remains the root of many of our most horrible choices. I suspect women are somewhat more inclined to marry their mistakes which doesn’t improve anything and usually sets the stage for lots of drama in the future. Maybe that is changing, but cultural conditioning goes deep. It’s a lot harder to escape your conditioning than you imagine. Just when you think you’re free, you discover you’re doing exactly what you swore you’d never do.
Through a combination of a lust, loneliness and more than a little hubris, I achieved a hormonally induced prefrontal lobotomy. Staying determinedly stupid, I wound up married to the wrongest possible person in a country where women can’t initiate divorce. Good show Marilyn!
It took years and a lot of blood under the bridge to get my life back. It was ugly, expensive and painful — and completely avoidable. I made a moronic decision against all advice. Even many years later, I have trouble believing I did that.
Some people need to loosen up. Others need to tighten up. I’ve been on both sides at different times in my life … and my conclusion? There is a very good reason our heads are at the top of our bodies. The brain is supposed to be the boss.
You’re going to get in a lot less trouble with your brain at the helm. If your head is saying “Whoa, pal … don’t do that!” you really should listen.
I was 46 years old when my homemade strawberry preserves jelled properly. Probably what broke the barrier was overcoming a longstanding aversion to putting sufficient sugar in the mix. Alternatively, I could have solved the problem by adding tapioca starch or pectin, but I’m a a bit of a food snob. I wanted my preserves made of just fruit and sugar.
The day the preserves came out perfectly was the day my first husband finally died. He had been dying for a long time. It was a Friday, a rare brilliant spring day in New England. Jeff had been sick for almost a year, in what we politely called a coma, but which was actually a vegetative state. Now gone. I had not come to terms with it though I’d certainly had plenty of time. Probably no amount of time would have been enough.
Other than Jeff’s dying, it was a good time. Garry and I were happy. We were good together, busy with career and friends. Yet there was that underlying sadness we could not avoid, the knowledge that a death was near at hand. Happiness and sadness don’t cancel one another. The good things are not a balance against pain. Feelings aren’t an equation. You can’t add columns of positive and negatives in your life and come up with a number in the middle. In the real world, joy and misery cohabit. We live with both together. Emotions are messy.
My head was a wheel of memories, a slide show carousel. Faces, places, good years, bad. Bittersweet, sad, joyous, funny. Strawberry jam that never jelled.
I married Jeffrey at 18 and thought myself very mature. He was almost 30, but he thought me very mature too. Both of us were wrong. Yet we muddled through. We were hard triers. When we had no idea what to do, we faked it. Eventually, we became the people we had long pretended to be and it turned out, not the people we needed to be for each other.
Though we went in different directions, we stayed friends. No matter where on Earth I was, I knew Jeffrey was there for me. We had a better divorce than most marriages. Decades passed. Jeff’s health deteriorated. He survived things that should have killed him, so what a shock he should die of the thing that was to extend his life. The heart surgery should have given him years, decades. When Sue called late on an August evening reality upended and everything screeched to a halt. No, his body wasn’t dead, but his brain was. The future world would be without Jeff. I would never call to tell him something funny that happened, hear his sarcastic, drawling response.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Someone rewrote the script when our backs were turned.
Fall passed and winter too. Jeff remained in a vegetative state. Someone who looked just like him was wearing his body and that shell remained alive through the seasons. We visited. I stayed for weeks to help care for him. Finally, as spring was nearly summer, the piper played. And now, the ashes were scattered.
Just the other day, Garry glimpsed a someone in a crowd who looked just like Jeff.
John Howell’s “Rule is as Rule Does” which I reblogged the other day got me thinking about life and how we invent our own rules as we go along. I make rules for myself and I follow them with almost religious fervor. But I hate rules and resent them. I was born rebellious.
The only rules I follow are my own. What are those rules? I’m glad you asked.
I’ve had an interesting life in which the light at the end of the tunnel has pretty much always been the headlight of an oncoming train. At one point, I got so stressed I could barely breathe. That was when I realized I needed to do things differently. I had plenty of problems without stressing myself to death.
I began by getting a tattoo, a visible symbol of my life. It was an acknowledgement of change and in a way, an acceptance of my survival and the likelihood of having to do it over again. I didn’t know at the time how right I was. It is a large phoenix tattoo. It’s a one-of-a-kind, designed for me. I had it put toward the back of my left calf. I didn’t realize it was going to be quite so big, but I’ve come to quite like it. I was 57 when I got my piece of body art. It’s my only tattoo. One shouldn’t make permanent life decisions in a hurry or before one is old enough to know ones own mind (that’s a rule too). A tattoo is more permanent than most marriages, so if you’re going to get one, make it neutral enough so if life changes a lot, it won’t be a highly visible embarrassment for long decades to come. Spelling and punctuation count. A typo in a tattoo is with you forever.
It is difficult to take a focused picture of the lower back area of ones own left leg. Also it’s worth remembering that blue jeans leave red ridges. If you want a picture of a your own body or some part of it, getting someone else to take the picture is probably better. The good part? Both terriers were really excited when I took off my jeans and socks. I’m pretty sure they thought it was a new game. Bonnie figured maybe she’d score a pair of socks but I outwitted her and put them on the desk where she couldn’t get them. Hah! Gotcha! Anyway, asking Garry to take this picture seemed too weird and would have required more explanation than he or I was ready to deal with. So I did it myself. Someone else could have done it better. I’m just saying.
I never really formulated my rules before, so this has been an interesting exercise. I don’t expect anyone else to follow them, though they aren’t bad and I don’t think they would hurt anyone. They come out of years of doing everything wrong, of worrying myself into ulcers, of simmering with anger at injustice, and being frantic with concern over every ecological or political crisis. I never learned anything the easy way. These dozen rules work for me.
Laugh often. Cultivate friends who share your sense of humor.
If you can’t fix it, don’t brood about it.
Have a pet. Cats, dogs, chickens, ferrets, bunnies, reptiles, bats or birds. Anything but spiders. I don’t like spiders.
Don’t argue with stupid people.
When you know you’re wrong, give up and apologize.
Worrying is a waste of time. Whatever you are worried about, something else will happen.
Staying angry at someone who wronged you hurts you, not them. They aren’t losing sleep over you. Forget it. Move on.
Be a gracious winner. People may sympathize with a sore loser, but everyone resents a gloating winner.
The path less traveled frequently winds up at a dead-end. Before traveling down unmapped roads, be sure you know how to make u-turns in tight spaces.
When you have a choice, do the right thing. If you don’t have a choice, do the best you can.
Brutal honesty is inevitably more brutal than honest. Be kind.
If you’re an artist, do your thing. Talking about it doesn’t count.
One rule to rule them all:
Make your own rules and live your own life. Everyone is unique. Celebrate your difference.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
