Mother’s Day got away from her

It’s all about mothers. As well it should be.

Fathers are nice, more or less, but mothers are essential. You

know it, I know it, everyone knows it. When is the last time you saw

some poor soul in a movie, who is delirious on his death bed, take

one last breath, reach out toward no one in particular and say, “Dad,

is that you?”

Never, that’s when. The line is “Mom, is that you?” always, every

time, no exceptions.

Mother’s Day ragers are not new. They date back to ancient Greece,

the earliest being a yearly tribute to Rhea, who was the mother of

all the gods, and boy was she tired.

The Roman festival of Hilaria, which must have been very funny,

dates back to 250 B.C. and honored the goddess Magna Mater, who was

Alma Mater’s cousin. (No she wasn’t. I made that up.) To honor Magna

Mater (“Great Mother” in Latin) a temple was built on Rome’s Palatine

Hill, where people would bring gifts to offer Maggie on the big day.

A holiday called “Mothering Sunday” popped up in England in the

1600s, celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent to honor England’s

mummys, which sound like Egypt’s mummies except they’re different.

But in this country, it all started with Anna M. Jarvis. Jarvis

was born in 1864, at the close of the Civil War, and died in 1948,

the year I was born. The idea that someone who was born during the

Civil War lived until the year I was born is neither lost on me nor

very amusing, I might add.

At any rate, Annie’s was a hard-knocks life. (Some of you got

that, some of you didn’t.) The daughter of a strict Methodist

minister, she graduated from the Female Seminary in Wheeling, W.Va.

and taught Sunday School in the Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton

for 20 years. She never married and was extremely attached to her

mother, Anna Reese Jarvis, who worked tirelessly for mothers who had

lost sons in the Civil War.

Mrs. Jarvis died in May 1905. With her father already gone, Anna

Jarvis was left alone to care for her blind sister, Elsinore.

This is depressing me, and I didn’t know the woman, other than

that she died in 1948, which I still resent. I was going to say

Elsinore’s last wish was to have her ashes scattered over a lake

somewhere in the west, but I’m not.

Anna Jarvis missed her mother something awful and started a

national letter-writing campaign in 1907 to make Mother’s Day a

holiday across the land. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson actually

did something, to everyone’s surprise, when he signed a bill

proclaiming the second Sunday in May “Mother’s Day and You Better

Call Her” forever more.

But as the years passed, Anna Jarvis’ crusade took a strange turn.

She became more and more upset about the commercialization of

Mother’s Day. She got some more paper, refilled her pen and sent a

blizzard of letters to ministers, politicians and editors far and

wide.

She was particularly irked with florists.

“What will you do to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates,

racketeers, kidnappers and other termites,” she wrote, “that would

undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest

movements and celebrations?”

Two things, Annie -- no more caffeine, and how did termites get

involved in this?

In the 1930s, the Postal Service announced a Mother’s Day stamp

featuring Whistler’s Mother and a vase of white carnations, and Anna

Jarvis went postal. She campaigned day in and day out against the

stamp, and actually convinced President Roosevelt to remove the words

“Mother’s Day” from the stamp, although he wouldn’t budge on the

white carnations.

When Eleanor Roosevelt joined a group called American War Mothers,

which sold white carnations for Mother’s Day to raise funds -- Anna

Jarvis started going through two reams of paper a day. She crashed a

meeting of the American War Mothers, shouting about the desecration

of Mother’s Day. She had to be forcefully removed by the police.

According to the “Florists Review,” a floral industry trade

journal, “Miss Jarvis was completely squelched.”

But even though they sparred for years, the floral industry never

forgot their debt to Anna Jarvis for creating Mother’s Day. She spent

the last months of her life alone and penniless in a nursing home.

Unknown to her, a floral industry trade group paid all her medical

and nursing home expenses in full.

So there you have it, the strange saga of Anna Jarvis, Magna Mater

and Rhea and the Mummys, which was a rock group in the ‘70s, I think.

If you’re lucky enough to still have your mom, seize the day. Do

everything you can, in the biggest way possible.

Just don’t sing that song ... “M” is for the many things she gave

me. “O” means only that she’s growing old.” It’s just too sappy, even

for Mother’s Day.

I gotta go.