Celebrating Mother's Day

My mother Mary in 1985

To all our mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, mothers-to-be, foster mothers and step-mothers, our prayers are with you. On this special day, we pray that they will place their lives and their families’ well-being under the Blessed Mother’s protection. Let us also remember those mothers who are in heaven, waiting for us as patiently as they used to wait at midnight when we were late coming home from a party. A news item on TV showed that if a mother who stays home were to be paid according to the work she does, cleaning, cooking, teaching, counseling, fixing, decorating, driving, etc, she would be working an average 92 hours a week, and she will be earning a minimum of $138,000 a year. My own mother would have earned over $8 million in her lifetime! We love them, and we thank them for all they do for us. May God bless them with eternal happiness in his bosom, until we eventually join them at our final destination.

My mother (pregnant with me) and father with my two sisters in 1952

The idea to celebrate Mother’s Day came to Anna Jarvis, a Philadelphia school teacher, first expressed to a group of friends in 1907. She was originally from rural West Virginia, but her family had moved to Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century. So persuasive was her concept, so diligent was her dedication, that by 1908 she marshaled the support to carry out the first observance of Mother’s Day in May 1908, back in her family surroundings of Grafton, Virginia. Two years later, Mother’s Day became a state holiday by a proclamation by the then-Governor William Glassman. And behold, three years later, Congress proclaimed that henceforth, Mother’s Day should be a national holiday, marked by a Presidential Proclamation issued in May 1914. Today, Mother’s Day is celebrated all over the world on the second Sunday in May.