4 minutes reading time
Second Sunday of May. Mother's Day.
Facebook is melting. Twitter is gurgling. Each post more pathetic than the last. A son uploads a photo of himself — not of his mother, himself — holding a rose, grinning like he's won something. A daughter writes three paragraphs of undying devotion addressed to a woman who, I guarantee you, has never once opened a browser. Another person shares a Hallmark-looking graphic with cursive text and a stock photo of some white woman hugging some other white woman in a sunlit field.
Their mothers are not on Facebook. Their mothers don't know what Facebook is.
The message went to nobody. The devotion was performed for everyone else.
That's the whole thing, isn't it. It's not for the mother. It was never for the mother. It's for the audience watching you love your mother. The ritual eats the feeling whole and spits out a branded product.
I keep thinking about Anna Jarvis.
She's the one who started this. 1908. Her own mother had just died. Anna Marie Jarvis — who had watched her mother dedicate her life to women's friendship clubs, to nursing soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, who had made peace in communities torn apart — Anna decided the world owed her mother a day. A quiet, personal day.
She campaigned for years. Wrote letters to politicians, to newspapers, to pastors. She won. In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed it into law. National Mother's Day. Second Sunday of May.
She must have felt something that day. Some relief. Some completion.
Then Hallmark got hold of it.
The greeting card industry was waiting. They didn't waste a week. By 1920 the thing Anna had meant as a private, handwritten observance — she'd specifically said handwritten letters, not store-bought cards, handwritten — had become the biggest retail event in the calendar. Carnations being sold by the gross. Pre-printed sentiment in envelopes. Department store Mother's Day sales. Chocolates in heart-shaped boxes.
She was horrified. She said so publicly. She called them "money-mad pirates." She sued them. She crashed their fundraisers, their flower-vendor conventions. She was escorted out of events by police. She was called unstable.
She spent everything she had fighting it. The legal fees. The campaigns. The pamphlets.
Near the end, she did door-to-door in Philadelphia. Think about that. An old woman, going house to house, asking people to sign a petition to abolish the holiday she had built. Her own holiday. She wanted it rescinded by Congress. She wanted to pull the whole thing back before it ate everyone alive.
She went door to door. Philadelphia streets. Knocking.
Nobody really listened. Why would they. The cards were already selling. The florists had already planned their inventory. The candy makers had contracts.
She died in 1948. Poor. Half-blind. In a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The irony that people she'd never met paid for her care — some of them from the very greeting card and flower industries she'd spent thirty years fighting — is the kind of thing you can't write without a laugh that hurts somewhere behind your sternum.
And here we are. 2011.
People on Facebook posting for mothers who are not on Facebook, because the calendar said so, because everyone else is posting, because it costs nothing and looks like something.
Anna Jarvis went door to door in Philadelphia to stop this exact thing from existing. She burned her money, her health, her reputation on it.
She lost completely. We won. We got the day. We're celebrating it right now, on our terms, at no emotional cost whatsoever, with a graphic we didn't make, for an audience that doesn't love our mothers either.
Happy Mother's Day.