Mother’s Day is one of those interesting holidays — kind of like Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. — in its presumption that we tend to ignore the most important people in our lives, and therefore need to designate a particular day on which to collectively recognize them. We‘re all at least occasionally guilty of taking people for granted, and it seems mothers are right there at the top of the list.
So about 120 years ago, a woman by the name of Anna Jarvis wanted to honor not only her own mother’s considerable accomplishments, but also the accomplishments and sacrifices made by all mothers. Apparently there were a lot of ladies at the time feeling underappreciated, because the idea really caught on, and it wasn’t long before it was proclaimed a national holiday by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Mother’s Day is now celebrated, usually in the spring, in more than 40 countries.
I don’t know how it was at your house, but when I was growing up Mother’s Day was actually kind of fun. In school, we always made some snazzy cards with colored craft paper, paper doilies, macaroni, and lots of that thick, funny-smelling paste some of the kids liked to eat. Unfortunately, and to my great shame, my dear mother kept every single one of the cards I made for her. They were found after her death more than 50 years later and bore silent witness to my lack of artistic ability with pasta and paste. My poetic skills were also lacking, as evidenced by one particularly heartfelt inscription: “Violets are blue/roses are red/I love you dear Mother/because you keep me fed.” Billy Shakespeare had nothing on me!
Thank goodness I didn’t have to rely solely on any maternal beneficence to be gained from those admittedly terrible cards, because every year Dad would take me to buy Mom a gift. Being a kid, I didn’t have a clue what to get her, and for some reason Dad’s suggestions always had to do with perfume. He seemed to think she really liked one called Tabu, so after a while Mom had everything Tabu the Dana company ever made. By my pre-teens I’d finally figured out Mom didn’t really care for Tabu, and I began selecting nice little gifts for her myself. Eventually I was off to college, and then spent the better part of 14 years living 800 miles away, so Mother’s Day was simply celebrated with a card and a phone call.
Hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the approach of yet another obligatory annual celebration of all things “Mom” caused me a bit of anxiety. Living as I now did in closer proximity, there was no way I was getting off with just a phone call or card in the mail. As Mom got older she demanded extended face time with one or, better yet, both of her children. An itinerary approved in advance was also required — one preferably involving offerings of food and the rendering of gifts in order to ensure peace in the realm in the coming year ahead. And woe betides any mortal, children included, who dared ignore her in her matriarchal splendor, or underperformed in their sacramental duties on this holiest of days. She was — not just on this day, but every day of the year — the dynamic core, exerting a constant gravitational pull around which our small familial planetary system orbited, and she wasn’t about to let us forget it!
It’s believed the earliest celebration of motherhood was a festival in ancient Greece honoring Rhea, mother of all gods, who was considered a symbol of female fertility, motherhood and the passing of one generation to another. Perhaps my mother was channeling Rhea, because she certainly had all those bases covered — especially the “passing of one generation to another” thing.
Mom was the “keeper,” the storyteller of our family. She was the one who — on her good days — would regale me with tales of all our kith and kin. Her stories were decidedly more Brothers Grimm than Hans Christian Andersen, and not the sunny sort of remembrances one would typically impart on a young child. But the tales were hers to tell, and she would tell them in her way, and in her time, and to whom she chose.
Being her oldest and only child until the age of 10, I was elected to be the next keeper of these sometimes shocking, mostly dark, and vaguely disturbing bits of autobiography, familial history and mythology. The stories were often vague, tenuous and open to endless speculation, but the connections to the past, people and places were real none-the-less. In this way my mother fulfilled perhaps her most important maternal task: she passed the torch to the next generation; she made sure the stories would continue to be told.
So now her name has been added to our pantheon of forebears and, with each story told, her memory is celebrated, and lives on a while longer.
W. R. van Elburg is a James City County resident. He can be reached at w.r.vanelburg@gmail.com.
