An Attorney’s Brief On Mother’s Day

Since man first peopled the Earth, mothers have enjoyed special esteem. The Greeks revered Rhea, mother of many of their gods, as the Romans did their Cybele. Early Christians during Lent honored Jesus’ mother, Mary. In England this was expanded to include all mothers, and was called Mothering Sunday.

I have all of this information, and more, from montgomeryadvertiser.com and a retired attorney.

All that is left for me to do is to wish every mother a wonderful day full of love and appreciation.

Development of Mother’s Day

By Tom Fitzpatrick, a retired attorney, who writes from Montgomery, AL.

America’s Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May, was fathered by an infamous Alabama political scoundrel, and mothered by a woman named Anna who lived with her mother most of her life and still produced 11 children….

It disturbed Julia Ann Howe that America had no Mother’s Day, and once she had fermented her grapes of wrath into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” she turned her energies in 1875 into a campaign for one. Nothing came of this, but years later one Anna Jarvis took up the crusade, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the legislation that the second Sunday of May shall be Mother’s Day in America. Jarvis’s mother had died on the second Sunday in May….

As the years went by and greeting cards, candy, flowers, long distance calls and restaurant sales doubled and tripled, Anna Jarvis grew angry over the commercialism of Mother’s Day. In 1923 she filed a lawsuit to stop a Mother’s Day festival, and was arrested at a convention where she attempted to disrupt the sale of carnations. Before she died in 1948, she bitterly regretted ever starting Mother’s Day….

Children instinctively go straight to the core. The vignette which brings home the point of this column features a six-year-old being asked, “Why did God make mothers?” and he says, “She’s the only one who knows where the Scotch tape is.”