Happy Mother’s Day, everyone. Let’s celebrate by returning this day to its radical roots.  

Mother’s Day, as most of us know, was not invented by Hallmark. Instead, according to National Geographic, “It all started in the 1850s, when West Virginia women’s organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis…held Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination.”

There are many battles we can fight today, including infant mortality rates, which are still extraordinarily high in this very wealthy country of ours. Like many things in the United States, this is an issue deeply connected to race and socioeconomics, and perhaps a sense of exceptionalism. Cari Romm, writing for the Atlantic in 2014, described it this way:  “…children of poor minority women in the U.S. (are) much more likely to die within their first year than children born to similar mothers in other countries.”

In another piece from 2014, published on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham assails the U.S’s high rates of infant deaths and notes that, if Mississippi were a country, its rate of 9.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births would place it “somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain.” 

The radical roots of Mother’s Day have been taken over, like almost everything else, by the pressure to honor mothers through store-bought gifts, most of which follow the kind of apron-laced gender story lines–or just flat out crass commericalism–that would probably enrage and embarrass our feminist foremothers, from Ann Reeves Jarvis to Sojourner Truth and beyond.

Even my 10 year-old son ended his very sweet Mother’s Day poem, written just for me, by saying that I look prettiest when cooking. Anyone who knows me or my family will find this very funny, since my husband is the cook in our house. Guess I don’t look my prettiest very often.

And that’s fine with me. 

Ann Reeves Jarvis, the originator of Mother’s Day as a day of service to the oppressed, the dying, and the most vulnerable among us, had a daughter of her own. Her name was Anna Jarvis, and she promoted the first organized Mother’s Day celebrations in the early 20th century. Very quickly, the holiday was taken over by the new forces of marketing and consumerism that were exploding across the United States. Jarvis fought against this with everything she had, and died penniless.

I’m writing this from a position of privilege and joy, surrounded by the flowers my own children picked for me this morning. They haven’t bought me gifts,  but have made me my own cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice. It’s a big treat. 

As Mother’s Day rolls on, I will stop and think about all the mothers who are not able to know and love their children in this way because they are the wrong color, or because they are too poor. Or because they live in the wrong state, or the wrong country.

Here’s hoping our radical roots will flourish between now and the next time Mother’s Day comes around.