Mother’s Day: The Lost Story

The collective unconscous remembers everything that modern culture has forgotten and covered over.

So here, let us go behind the Hallmark card displays, where there is a little door, and entering through, we find ourselves in a muddy field where the land has been fed by boys’ blood. And, just this then whilst standing here on this field meant to grow life but which became a slaughter site instead….

Mother’s Day evolved from a specially coded day begun after the Civil War. In 1870, Mother’s Day was called in order to make a wild and deep protest about the carnage of the war between the states, called by women who had lost their sons…and sometimes, for a time, their minds…but not their great hearts.

Sometimes people say the term ‘mother’ can only be applied to a woman who has given physical birth. I say ‘a blessed Mother’ is any woman who reveres life and strives to be a humble multipara in heart and mind and voice every single day.

Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870
by Julia Ward Howe
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

“Mother’s Day: The Lost Story,” from I Put the Culture on the Couch © 2007, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved, is printed here under Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it be attributed with author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other uses, contact copyright holder.