Word Weld

I was planning on doing a Mother’s Day Blog, as I like to do a blog for every major holiday, even if I don’t get very many in between. I wasn’t sure what to write about it, when my wife commented on post on Facebook. The post is being shared among mother groups and pages, and it contains an article on a Christian lady’s website, called Time Warp Wife. There’s occasionally some good stuff on that site, so my wife follows the site, but was dismayed by the site’s endorsement of this view. Maybe you’ve seen this article, maybe not. It was an “open letter” to pastors on their bad Mother’s Day habits. What habits? Glad you asked.

What is the big deal about celebrating Mother’s Day, anyway? And why would I or my wife be dismayed about an article that’s obviously very kind and full of gentleness and compassion?

The article is very kind and compassionate, and gentle. It’s also wrong.

Let me say right now I’m going to try to be as loving and gentle as I can. I realize that it is easy to be scathing and unloving when sitting behind a computer screen, and that is not my intent. However scathing or “unloving” I am ultimately, however, please be aware that I have toned it down immensely. How on earth could I be so severe about an article written by a compassionate woman who is sensitive to the deep pain felt by women on Mother’s Day, including herself? That is an easy question. The answer is because while the pain is real and should not be scorned, taking that pain and making others live in fear of it is simply wrong.

Let me explain in more detail. There is a movement among Christians in America, across all denominations, where women are speaking out against the celebration of Mother’s Day. The reason for their outcry is that they claim Mother’s Day (due largely to how churches and pastors celebrate it) is selfish and insensitive, and is merely a way to indirectly ostracize, shame, and humiliate women who are a) no longer mothers due to their child(ren) passing away, b) are unable to become mothers due to infertility, c) pregnant, d) the unfortunate sufferer of multiple miscarriages, e) uninterested in becoming mothers but still feeling a general bad feeling from left out. Now, I’m going to be extra careful where I drop my sarcasm and mocking (which I will use occasionally), because no matter how erroneous the charges leveled against pastors, churches, and Mother’s Day in general are, there is legitimate pain and remorse going on in the lives of real people. So, let me proceed as deliberately as I am able to.

First let’s take a look at where Mother’s Day came from. Now, there have been celebrations about motherhood far back in ancient history. But since I doubt we celebrate anything like those people, we’ll not go back that far. Really, the roots of Mother’s Day began in England with a holiday called Mothering Sunday. This was a Christian holiday, centered largely around the Virgin Mary, but in which children would give their own mothers’ honor also. In America, Mother’s Day got some groundwork by Ann Reeves Jarvis just before, during, and after the Civil War. She started Mother’s Day Work Clubs, which aimed to teach good mothering practices. Jarvis’ work was mainly about children and also unification in the post-Civil War climate that she worked, and her work was successful.

Another individual who promoted a kind of “Mother’s Day” was Julia Ward Howe, though we won’t talk much about her because she also worked during the Civil War Era and her efforts were apparently aimed more at promoting world peace than mothers.

Really, though, Anna Jarvis was the one who ultimately invented America’s Mother’s Day. She was Ann Reeves Jarvis’ daughter. The two women were both raised Christian and were apparently Christians themselves, seeking to honor God by honoring the mothers they love and who loved them. An interesting point to make here is that Anna Jarvis never married or had children. Remember that, I’ll come back to it.

Anna got people in her area writing letters to their mothers and going to church in honor of them, and after a lot of letter writing and begging got the states of West Virginia and Oklahoma to officially recognize the holiday. From there it spread to other states like wildfire — apparently people felt their mothers needed to be honored. Eventually, then President Woodrow Wilson made the holiday official in 1914, and voilà, Mother’s Day.

So Mother’s Day was started by people who cared about children, wanted world peace, and loved their own mothers so much that they felt they should be honored officially, even nationally? And in church too? Yes.

Well, what does God say about mothers, since that was a largely secular bit of history?

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
-Exodus 20:12

And he that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death.
-Exodus 21:15

And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.
-Exodus 21:17

Ye shall fear [respect or reverence] every man his mother, and his father, and keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God.
-Leviticus 19:3

There is a generation that curseth their father, and doth not bless their mother.
-Proverbs 30:11

It seems pretty clear to me that God doesn’t say we should celebrate mothers on a particular day. Rather, it seems clear that He would have us honor our mothers (and fathers) all the time. After all, there is no time-in, time-out on “Honor thy father and thy mother…” is there? So what’s the rub here? Mother’s Day is a good holiday, and it seems to align well with God’s intent for humanity. Why is there a controversy?

Frankly, because in this country, we cannot deal with our own feelings. And this is where I might get rough but stay with me, because we need to hear this. Love is not always gentle. There are many feelings in life, because we are creatures of spirit and emotion. We feel joy, anger, grief, confusion, wonder, etc. Pain is a physical phenomenon, yet can also be an emotion, as can shame, loneliness, and a host of others. Feelings are intrinsically based upon our perception. So, what’s happening here is that a woman who is not married goes to a church service and listens to everyone talk about mothers, watches the pastor ask all the mothers to stand, and observes as the church gives the mothers a special gift or a meal. And that woman feels something. She feels left out. She feels not special. Even if she didn’t think about it before she wishes she was a mother.

But let’s be perfectly honest. This woman is no different than all the kids at the birthday party who weren’t having a good time because it wasn’t their birthday. I think we can all agree (maybe) that this is not a legitimate feeling. These single women are just envious of the attention, whether intentionally or not, so let’s leave them be. I want to focus on a more important group of people.

These are the women who go to church on Mother’s Day and feel real pain from real wounds. In these cases, the feelings they feel are legitimate and natural. They can be mothers whose children have passed, or had one or more miscarriages, or for whatever reason are unable to bear children. These people have gone through real and lasting heartbreak, and some do not recover emotionally. For them it is too difficult to come to church and endure a celebration for something they had and lost, or almost had, or through no fault of their own can never have. To these women I say in the sincerest tone I can: I understand. My wife was unable to have children for more than 2 years and went through some deep pain and fear, and Mother’s Day was hard for her. And then after we had children, she had a miscarriage, so we know what is unknowable save to those who have experienced it. We get that Mother’s Day can be painful. That being said, your pain, and mine, and my wife’s, do not provide a good enough reason for everyone else to stop celebrating Mother’s Day. If my wife couldn’t go to church on Mother’s Day because of the heartache, we just wouldn’t go that day. And I wouldn’t feel bad about it. But I wouldn’t stride into the pastor’s office and demand that he cancel the whole day on account of my wife’s feelings. Yes my wife’s feelings are real, legitimate, and meaningful, but they are not enough to stifle a real, legitimate, and meaningful celebration of a wonderful institution that God Himself designed and ordained, and hallowed.

Now, I am no longer talking to the women who are deeply hurting, but to those who are lobbying on their behalf, having taken upon themselves the charge of obliterating Mother’s Day in the name of these hurting women’s feelings. I have the greatest criticism for you, because you cloak your liberal culture behind Christian love and sensitivity. Because really that’s all this lobbying is: liberal dogma which has infiltrated the church. How dare we leave anyone out, right? Isn’t that how the left operates? “No child left behind?” Which basically means grades don’t matter because everyone will pass no matter what they learned or didn’t learn… We want to make everyone feel good all the time, as if that was what God intended. You people say that Mother’s Day is a way of publicly shaming people who can’t be mothers, or leaving out “honorary” mothers, like aunts and sisters and so forth who end up doing a mother’s job. But that’s a straw man argument. You’ve set up a false image of what Mother’s Day is and then you start attacking it and we end up defending it. But the fact is that Mother’s Day isn’t about mothers honoring themselves, it’s about honoring our own mothers.

Remember Anna Jarvis? I told you I’d come back to her. She started Mothers Day, and she wasn’t even a mother. Never was. She didn’t start Mother’s Day for herself, but for her own mother. God never says “Mothers honor yourselves.” He says “[YOU] Honor your father and your mother.” Mother’s Day is a day you can remember what your own mother did for you in your life, and what mothers around the world sacrifice for their children.

Well then, you pandering liberal churchgoers ask, what about those of us who had terrible mothers? So what? Mothers are just people, imperfect people. Some of them are genuinely bad, just like some fathers and some children. If your mother doesn’t deserve honoring then fine, but don’t say I can’t honor my mother because you can’t honor yours. That’s just feeling sorry for yourself and taking it out on me, and everyone else who just happened to have a mother who loved her children and tried to take care of them. Mother’s Day is not a selfish holiday. It’s not so a bunch of women can strut around with corsages and get free pens in church and look down their noses at all the inferior women who haven’t had a kid of their own. It’s not a holiday for one person, or any group of people. It is a holiday for a concept, Motherhood, which is a wonderful, beautiful thing. No woman gets mothering 100% right, but the best mothers never stop trying to get as close as they can, and that’s what we want to honor, that sacrifice, that love. It’s not about shaming anyone. If you feel shame because of Mother’s Day, then you need to deal with it yourself, not try to ruin everyone else’s day with it. We can talk about your shame 364 days out of the year, but on Mother’s Day we are honoring mothers. Here’s a thought: try focusing on your own mother instead of your lack of motherhood? That’s what it’s all about, after all, just like Anna Jarvis intended, and more importantly like God intended.

Frankly, I think (and I think God’s word lines up with this) that our mothers deserve honor 100% of the year. Is one day too much to begrudge them? And you know what, if you feel angry, like the girl in that article, and you want to stand in church when the pastor tells asks the mothers to stand up, go ahead. Stand up. No one is shaming you. I daresay most of the women still seated around you aren’t slumping down in their chairs with their arms crossed, or running crying from the sanctuary. No, they’re looking with love and admiration on the women around them who are standing, because it’s about them, and it’s ok. No, it’s more than ok, it’s right. So stand up with the mothers if you want, angry single woman who feels left out. It’s between you and God, and has nothing to do with any of the rest of us. Sorry your feelings got hurt, but frankly they shouldn’t have been. Because none of it was about you.

You know, I don’t get mad on President’s Day, even though I could, because it just isn’t fair that presidents get honored and I don’t. I could just as easily be a president, so I should get honored along with Washington and Lincoln. But I realize that’s just silly. It’s silly for me to want to cancel Memorial Day because I’m not a veteran and I feel left out, or because a loved one of mine was in the military and died, and it brings back sad memories. It’s silly for a legal immigrant to want to cancel the 4th of July because it doesn’t celebrate his country of origin’s independence. And it’s silly (and selfish) when on my twin girls’ birthday, my youngest daughter throws a fit because she doesn’t get presents, or the cake she wants. Frankly, it’s not about her.

She’ll learn that. She’ll feel bad for a while, but the fact that she has some negative feelings isn’t the end of the world. She’s 2, after all. When she’s older she’ll understand that not everything is about her. Or, if this movement continues in Christendom, maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll go into the world thinking that anytime she gets her feelings hurt, someone better pass a law to make it so nobody can do that to her ever again. Maybe, but over my dead body. Because as for me and my house, we will honor mothers on their day, and off it, and we will honor fathers (not me specifically) on their day, and off it. We will honor those who have lost children too, and if the church wants to recognize women who aren’t mothers but were mothers to someone, then we’ll celebrate them too. But this is Mother’s Day, not women’s day, and in it we celebrate mothers, not everyone, and not no one.

Remember, when everyone is special, no one is. That is where our society wants us: equal, and irrelevant, and feeling good about ourselves, despite the fact we have nothing to feel good about.