Happy Mother's Day

& Happy Mothers' Day too

Here is an image through the window next to my bed. I like that you can see a vase made for me by my friend and former student Jasmina (I use it to keep pens handy), and then in the background our porch where we have a big collection of plants that Bea is babysitting this summer. On the porch is a device for inflating rafts. So, even though it’s a dusty/pollenish image I like everything I see.

Good morning, Frog Troublers. I woke up late (for me) because I got up at four to try to see the northern lights. We have so much tree cover that it would be hard to see them here. But when I looked through the window at the black leaves and lighter sky, I was sure I saw a pulsing color, and so I put a jacket on over my pajamas and drove out to some nearby farmland. I stopped the car and waited with the lights off. I got out of the car and I could hear an owl and smell honeysuckle and wild blackberry blossoms, but I did not see the lights. Oh well!

When I got home I had trouble falling asleep again, until I remembered by best falling-asleep trick: pretend you are at an airport and your flight has been delayed or canceled and you have to sleep there with your luggage etc. Imagine you have to find somewhere to be comfortable, and then be amazed by how comfortable your bed is.

Here is Harriet’s suggestion for how to keep running: pretend that snakes are chasing you. She did this yesterday and ran for more than a mile without stopping.

Today Richard is taking us to an adventure/ropes course in Raleigh that I’m excited about. This was Bea’s idea because anytime we’re somewhere with a ropes course I always say “I’d like to try that!” So we’ll have more to report later.

In the meantime, this morning I read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American first thing, and I think you should too. She wrote about the first “Mothers’ Day,” plural, which was a pacifist holiday created by Julia Ward Howe, a suffragist who after the bloodshed of the Civil War opposed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Richardson writes,

Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder,” she wrote, but women did not have to accept “proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.” Mothers could command their sons, “who owe their life to her suffering,” to stop the madness.

"Arise, women!” Howe commanded. “Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’”

Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next great development in human history, ending war just as the antislavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit open-air meetings.

Howe organized international peace conferences, and American states developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly realized that there was much to be done before women could come together on a global scale. She turned her attention to women’s clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”

As Howe worked to unite women, she came to realize that a woman did not have to center her life around a man, but rather should be “a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility.” “This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world,” she later recalled, “or of a new testament to the old ordinances.” She threw herself into the struggle for women’s suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal participants in American politics.

While we celebrate the modern version of Mother’s Day on May 12, in this momentous year of 2024 it’s worth remembering the original Mothers’ Day and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must have the same rights as men, and that they must make their voices heard.

Did you know this history? I did not but I love it.

Do you have any tricks for how to fall asleep or how to keep running when you’re tired? We would also love to hear.

Here’s a photo of the garden, which is already providing bounteous salad greens: