The Totally True Origins and History of Mother's Day

A Thank You Note to Every Woman Who Held This Whole Thing Together

Today is one of my favorite days of the year because I get to talk about how much I love my mother!

The first thing you should know about Mother’s Day is that the woman who invented it spent the last twenty years of her life trying to destroy it.

Her name was Anna Jarvis. She never had children of her own. She never married. She loved her mom so much that when her mom died in 1905, she started a one-woman campaign to get the entire country to set aside a Sunday in May where everyone would, just for a few hours, stop being awful to the woman who fed them, clothed them, and didn’t drown them in a bucket when they were three years old and demanding chicken nuggets at four in the morning.

Anna Jarvis

It worked. Boy did it work. By 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed it into federal law. By 1920 Hallmark was selling pre-printed Mother’s Day cards, which Anna Jarvis viewed roughly the way most people view someone bringing a kazoo to a funeral. She started getting arrested at floral conventions. She publicly denounced candy companies. She tried to get the holiday cancelled by the government, which is a thing one citizen apparently used to be allowed to attempt. She died broke in a sanitarium in 1948, having spent her entire inheritance suing the people who turned her holiday into a Hallmark hostage situation.

I find this incredibly comforting. The patron saint of Mother’s Day was a woman so furious about commercialization that she literally died fighting card companies. Every time I see a World’s Best Mom mug at CVS I think: somewhere, Anna Jarvis is haunting the seasonal aisle, and I love her for it.

She wasn’t actually first, though. Anna just got the federal paperwork.

The Greeks Did It First Because the Greeks Always Did It First

Going way back, the ancient Greeks had a spring festival for Rhea, the mother of the gods, which involved honey cakes and fine drinks and presumably a lot of telling Rhea she didn’t look a day over four hundred. The Romans copied it (because the Romans copied everything from the Greeks and then claimed they invented it, like that one guy in your group project) and called it Hilaria, which is also what I call my caffeine-fueled meltdowns at 2 a.m. on deadline.

After Hilaria came Mothering Sunday in the UK, originally a day when servants got to leave their employers’ households and visit their mothers, which sounds wholesome until you remember that “servants” mostly meant thirteen-year-old girls scrubbing floors for rich families who legally owned their childhoods.

The Industrial Revolution mostly killed Mothering Sunday everywhere except a few churches that kept it on life support, and that’s where things stood until Anna Jarvis showed up in West Virginia and lit the fuse.

The thing is, Anna’s whole campaign worked because she was tapping into something humans have been doing for as long as humans have existed. Honoring the woman who kept you alive long enough to be ungrateful about it is not a 1914 invention. It’s an old, old reflex. You don’t have to dig through ancient history to see why. You just have to think about your own mom for thirty seconds and the math becomes obvious.

So let me tell you about mine.

The Woman Who Made Me Possible

She raised me alongside my dad in a normal Christian home, which I realize is a phrase that now sounds quaint, like saying “we had a rotary phone” or “I trust the FDA.” But that’s what it was. Two parents who loved each other, loved God, and decided early on that whatever else happened, the kids were going to know they were wanted. They split the work the way a marriage is supposed to split it, which is to say my dad worked himself half to death and my mom worked herself the other half to death, and somewhere in the overlap they raised three kids who turned out reasonably functional, which in this economy is basically a miracle.

My mom is the reason I can read, which she taught me before kindergarten because she didn’t trust the public school to do it correctly. She is the reason I know how to cook anything more sophisticated than instant ramen, the reason I learned to sew a button back on, the reason I know the words to most of the hymns in the Methodist hymnal, the reason I do not think it is acceptable to date a man who calls his mother by her first name in a sneer. She is the reason I pray before bed, the reason I write thank-you notes by hand, and the reason that when something goes wrong my first instinct is still, embarrassingly, to call her. I love my mom.

We were not rich. We were a regular family. There were stretches where I now realize, in retrospect, that things were probably tighter than my parents let on, because the rent always got paid and the lights always stayed on and the Christmas tree always had presents under it, and somebody was running the spreadsheet on that and it sure wasn’t me. My mom would set the table for dinner every single night with my dad at one end and her at the other and the three of us in between, and we would say grace, and we would actually talk to each other, like a sitcom from before the writers got divorced.

I grew up thinking everybody had this. Then I went to college and met people who had not, in fact, had this, and I realized something I had not appreciated before, which is that what my parents built was not the default. It was the result of two people deciding, every day, to keep showing up. My dad provided. My mom built the actual home inside the walls he was paying for. They did it on purpose. They did it together. And the reason I am the person I am is that I got to grow up inside that on-purpose-together thing for the entire first eighteen years of my life.

That is the thing nobody tells you about good moms. The really good ones make it look so easy that you grow up thinking everybody had it. Then you turn twenty-three and you try to feed yourself on a journalism student’s income and you realize: oh. Oh. She was performing miracles. Daily. While also helping me with my fractions. While also keeping the house from looking like a war crime. While also being the person my dad came home to. While also being the person my dad called from work when something went sideways, because he trusted her judgment more than anybody else’s on the planet.

And it isn’t just my mom. It’s every mom who ever did the thing. The grandma who watched the kids while their parents worked. The aunt who knew where the band-aids were. The neighbor lady who kept an extra plate at dinner because she could tell which kid on the block was having a rough week at home. The Sunday school teacher who made you memorize verses you didn’t appreciate until you were thirty. Civilization, the actual thing, the part where small humans grow into bigger humans who don’t bite people, runs almost entirely on women doing impossible work for not enough credit and definitely not enough money. None of it is in the GDP. None of it gets a Nobel. None of it gets a parade.

A holiday in May is genuinely the least we owe them, and even that one we managed to ruin with brunch reservations and overpriced flowers. Anna Jarvis was right to be furious. She just lost the war.

So here, before I get to the harder part, is the actual point of this article. Every mom reading this, every grandma, every aunt, every Sunday school teacher, every woman who mothered somebody who needed mothering, you are the reason any of this works at all. Civilization is a relay race, and you ran your leg of it. That gets remembered, even when nobody writes it down.

Now for the harder part.

What I Am Actually Afraid Of

I want to say something honest here, because Wolf taught me that the whole point of this publication is to say things out loud that everyone is thinking and nobody will admit.

I am twenty-three. I am almost done with my journalism degree. I take the bus to school because I cannot afford a car. I work for the Wise Wolf because I love it, and because Wolf is the closest thing to a real journalism mentor I have ever had, and because the alternative is going to work for a corporate news outlet that would ask me to write listicles about which Disney princess has the best skincare routine.

I am also, if we’re being honest, a little afraid.

Afraid I will never make enough money to have the kind of family I grew up in. Afraid that even if I do, the dating pool for a woman in her twenties looking for a husband who actually believes in marriage right now resembles a kiddie pool that somebody filled with regret and the kind of guy who has strong opinions about Andrew Tate. Afraid that the cost of having a child has gotten so high that having one is now a luxury good, like a Birkin bag, except the bag doesn’t develop a personality and ask you for snacks.

Most of all, I am afraid that my mom might be the last woman in my line who got to do the thing properly. Married to a good man, in a real home, with kids she actually got to raise instead of farming out to daycare from six weeks old, in a country that wasn’t actively hostile to the project of building a Christian family. I want what she had. I want what my grandmother had. I want what every woman in my bloodline going back as far as I can trace has had, which is the option of being a wife and a mother in a stable home, without that being a financial death sentence.

That is a horrifying sentence and I want you to read it slowly. The act of having a baby, the most basic biological function any species can perform, has become economically unreachable for an entire generation of women in the wealthiest country in human history. It used to be that you got married, you rented an apartment, you had a kid, you figured it out. Now you need a six-figure household income just to think about it. The number of women my age who want the family their mom had and will never get to have it because the math doesn’t work is going to be the largest unrecorded heartbreak of this century.

And that is by design. The world is being run, currently, by people who do not believe regular humans should reproduce. There are billionaires giving TED talks about how the planet has too many people on it, who also have eight children of their own, because the math, apparently, only applies to you. The same people who write checks to “family values” causes have spent thirty years engineering an economy where families are something only their class can afford to start.

That is the world we have been handed. We are not going to sit and accept it. That is what the Wise Wolf is for. And it is also why I’m about to ask you for money, which is going to feel like a tonal whiplash but my landlord does not accept gratitude as currency.

So Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day

To every mom reading this, you are doing better than you think. The fact that you are reading an investigative publication on a Sunday in May means you are awake, paying attention, and refusing to be lied to, which is already more parenting than most kids in human history ever got.

To every woman who isn’t a mom yet but wants to be, I see you, because I am you, and we are going to figure it out, even if we have to drag this whole rotten economy back to sanity by its lapels. To every woman who decided not to be a mom, or couldn’t, or lost the chance, your existence is not contingent on motherhood. You count. You have always counted.

And to my mom, thank you. For the lunches, the lessons, the bedtime prayers, the late-night talks, the fact that I know how to be in the world. Thank you for marrying my dad. Thank you for the home you built with him. Thank you for the kind of childhood that I now understand was not the default but the exception, and the reason I am even capable of writing this article. Anna Jarvis would have loved you. She’d have hated the brunch reservation though, so I’m bringing flowers to the house instead.

---

The Wise Wolf is two people. Wolf, who walked away from a tech career to do this work and has been paying for it dental-bill by dental-bill ever since. And me, Lily, who is currently writing this on a laptop that crashes every time I open more than four tabs, on a couch I bought on Facebook Marketplace, in an apartment whose rent I am genuinely not sure I will be able to cover next month if my hours get cut again. I am terrified, sometimes, that I am one of the last women in my line who will get to have the kind of family I grew up in, because the people running this country priced that family out of existence on purpose. I am working as hard as I can to make sure that doesn’t happen. The Wise Wolf is part of how. A paid subscription, even at the cost of one fancy coffee a month, keeps me writing instead of giving up and going to grad school for a degree I cannot afford and do not want. It keeps Wolf’s molars in his head. It keeps independent investigative journalism alive in a country that is actively trying to kill it. My mom got to be a wife and a mother in a real home. I would like the chance to do the same someday. Help me get there.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.