On Mothers

May 14, 2012 Editorial

Mother’s Day was invented in the USA, as increasingly as so many of our social practices, thanks to the power of the US media. In that vein, a beachhead has recently been opened on the celebration of “Thanksgiving Day”, complete with turkey and pumpkin pie. But back to Mother’s Day.
The driving force behind Mother’s Day was Anna Jarvis, who organized observances in West Virginia and Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. As the annual celebration became popular around the country, Jarvis asked members of Congress to set aside a day to honour mothers. She finally succeeded in 1914, when Congress designated the second Sunday in May as “Mother’s Day.”
As it turned out, her mother, Ann, had started Mother’s Day Work Clubs in five cities to improve health and sanitary conditions during the Civil War; soldiers from both sides were cared for equally. After her mother died, Anna Jarvis organized memorials in what ultimately led to the congressional action on Mother’s Day. But Anna Jarvis eventually came to resent the commercialization of the holiday — so much so that she campaigned for its abolition — to no avail.
She is said to have complained that she wanted it to be “a day of sentiment, not profit,” but instead had become a bonanza for greeting cards which she saw as “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.”
She and her sister spent the family assets trying to end it — and she was once arrested for protesting a sale of carnations for Mother’s Day after florists and greeting card companies realized in the early 1920s that the holiday could be a bonanza for them.
In this space we have regularly inveighed against, not necessarily Mother’s Day per se, but the excuse it offers some ‘lazy’ children to salve their conscience by only remembering their mothers on this day. Each country has its own ethos and practices, derived hopefully from their own experiences.
The US has commercialized Mother’s Day and maybe it has worked for them because they are such a mobile and transient society. There, it is expected that children will move out of their parents’ home as soon as they become adults – whether they are married or not.
It is very rare that the move out of the maternal home is to another home in the same community. And it is therefore not unusual for children to literally and figuratively move ‘away’ from their mothers (and fathers).
In Guyana, we are certainly not in a situation where we are as separated from our parents geographically as the Americans. And it should not become the practice to only remember our mothers one day per year.
We have to do better. Maybe part of the reason why violence against females in our society is increasing is that we are moving away from the high regard for mothers that traditionally typified our practices.
During slavery, our traditional family was torn asunder by the slave masters: it was mothers that kept the family going and bore all responsibility for its maintenance. There are more than vestiges of this practice stubbornly surviving into the present and all praise must be given to mothers.
In the indentured culture brought from India, ‘mother’ was defined as the highest role in the community and all respect, and indeed worship was offered to mothers.
The worst insult that could be hurled at anyone was accusing them of neglecting their mother. In fact for adult males, they were exhorted to look at all other females, other that their wives as their mothers so that they could be given respect and not be abused or insulted in any way.
But even as we exhort Guyanese not to arbitrarily import foreign customs, we note that President Obama just approved “same sex” marriage, which will definitely expand the meaning of ‘mother’.
We can expect to be exhorted to follow suit. What we are advising that unlike the blind practice of the commercialised “Mother’s Day’, we must have a very open debate on the practice.

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