Her kind, dreams . . .
It's Sol's day . . . and she's taking a rest from the flare-up's of the past few days to celebrate a bit more quietly. After all, it's Mother's Day.
Motherhood festivities have historically been in spring, the season of fertility, celebrated in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and England before coming to the U.S. “Mothers' Day” was introduced to America in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe, who wanted to set aside a day to protest their sons killing other mothers' sons in the civil war. Well, you can guess how long that lasted. It was reintroduced and quickly commercialized in 1908 as “Mother's Day” – moving the collective to the singular possessive. Heather Cox Richardson reflected on the original U.S. Mothers' day.
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house
so they won’t know what you’re up to.
– Frank O'Hara, “Ave Maria” from Lunch Poems. City Lights Books, 1964
Beauty is all about loving who you are. And if you have a problem with that, may I suggest you try loving who I am? I don’t care what you think of me, unless you think I’m awesome. – Miss Piggy
The Dream That I Told My Mother-in-Law
… She began to dream
of childhood flowers, her long-gone parents.
I told her my dream in a waiting room
… Mamma loved that dream so I told it again.
And soon she crossed over
… Daughter, she said, when her journey began,
You are a mother now,
and you have to take care of the world.
– Elizabeth Alexander From Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010, Graywolf Press, 2010.