Reclaim Mother’s Day
By Rev. Renita Green, Columnist
Mother’s Day has always been a source of stress in my life. My mother died when I was four years old and I do not remember celebrating Mother’s Day with her. My earliest memory is of heading to the small, southern Missouri town of Clinton, where she is buried. I remember standing at her tombstone.
A second significant Mother’s Day memory for me is at the age of 15 when—less than a month prior—I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl who was placed for adoption. At church, they recognized the oldest and youngest mothers. I was not recognized. I had given birth but was not a mother.
There are two horrible feelings on Mother’s Day. One is being a motherless child and the other is being a childless mother.
Now, fast-forward to my season of pastoring. I have watched women who have never given birth sit stone-faced. I have listened to painful tributes. I have felt the pain of forced tributes. There just seems to be so much more pain than joy on this “special day.”
I finally had enough of the pain and declared Mother’s Day to be Celebration of Womanhood Sunday. I wanted to release the pressure. In my research for an empowering sermon on womanhood, I came across the Mother’s Day Proclamation given by Julia Ward Howe in 1870. Her impassioned plea begins by calling women to action. She says, “Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears!” This proclamation was a call to action for women to demand an end to the Franco-Prussian War in which many of their sons and husbands were dying.
Just a few years earlier, Sojourner Truth would call the country to accountability with the declaration, “Ain’t I a woman?” Indeed, she was a woman and a mother. She was the mother of one child who died, one child that was the result of rape, and three children with her husband.
Howe is noted as being an abolitionist. However, I am aware that the suffering of black and brown mothers was not at the forefront of the movement for women’s liberation.
In further research, I learned how Ann Reeves Jarvis started “Mother’s Day Work Clubs.” My simplified interpretation of these clubs is that affluent women, with some mixture of compassion and guilt, went into an area where the infant mortality rate was extremely high and taught mothers about sanitation and nutrition. Jarvis’s daughter picked up her mother’s mantle; and in a desire to celebrate the elder Jarvis’s passion and activism, white carnations were given to all the mothers on a particular Sunday. Mother’s Day, as we know it today, is the result of the commercialization of this celebration, which the younger Jarvis protested until the end of her days.
As I mull over all of this information, I still find myself frustrated. Mother’s Day in every form is basically a day when white women expressed their outrage and despair over white children dying. It then later became a celebration of compassionate whiteness.
While these women sat in their pristine churches in fancy hats and white gloves, children of color—of African and Native heritage—continued to suffer and die in the arms of poor mothers who could not provide adequate food and nutrition for their babies. It is hard for me to join in the celebration when I think of the mothers whose children were lost to lynch mobs and false imprisonment.
Perhaps if all of this was in the past and there was a righting of wrongs, I could sigh and say, “Oh, that was then.” Yet, no such luck. Our children are still dying and are still targets of America’s injustice system. They are dying at alarming rates from community violence, police violence, domestic violence, drug addictions, suicide, and HIV/AIDS. Yet, we will gather ourselves together to be celebrated.
I don’t feel like celebrating. I long to #ReclaimMothersDay. I imagine a grand day of mothers walking out of their churches into the streets in their bonnets and gloves. I imagine a grand day of resistance declaring to our society, “You cannot place mothers on pedestals for one day while killing her children year ’round.” Such a day will continue to live in my imagination while once again, this year, I stand in the pulpit and look into the eyes of grieving women.
The Rev. Renita Marie Green, M.Div., has served as a pastor in the AME Church for the past 16 years. Pastor Renita has contributed writings to the Huffington Post, The Christian Recorder, CNN, St. Louis American, and the local patch.com blog site. Her favorite role in life is being a mom to Chrissi and Darren (Danielle).
