I spent a lot of time this week scouring collections of poetry and pouring through my usual go-to books for Sunday morning readings. I searched online for hours, googling: “Mother’s Day poems… SHORT Mother’s Day poems… Mother’s Day poems that DON’T TOTALLY SUCK.”

There are a few good ones out there. But most are either ponderously heavy or so treacly that they make my teeth hurt. Or both.

I’m not usually one to shy away from emotional intensity, but I do prefer that it be at least a little original. I’m pretty comfortable with effusive expression, with intimacy. But I want it to be genuine, and not just some hackneyed variation on “roses are red, violets are blue.” I am in fact a romantic idealist at heart. But, dang it, Mother’s Day is so perfumed and candy-coated that it mostly seems on the verge of losing all touch with reality.

I don’t mean to sound like a bitter crank.  I love my Mom to pieces and I miss her intensely.  But she herself tended to cringe at this overly sentimental holiday.  Mom liked things sassy, even snarky, which absolutely is not the general tone of Mother’s Day.  I always found it really hard to find bitchy and insulting Mother’s Day cards for her; most years, I had to make my own.  

And I’m finding it challenging to come up with a good Mother’s Day reading.

Travis suggested that we could re-enact a scene from one of our favorite movies, the horrible-wonderful camp biopic, Mommie Dearest, starring Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. Fifteen years ago, he and I performed the infamous “No wire hangers!” monologue in a talent show. And then, memorably, in 2024 our community produced a bold and frighteningly irreverent staged reading of the entire script, with “dueling Joans” chewing up the set. It was pretty awesome, but it seemed a little much for a Sunday morning.

So, then, I thought maybe our reading could be a short history of the holiday.  

Mother’s Day is rooted originally in abolition, women’s suffrage, and peace movements, including the activism of Julia Ward Howe. And also in “Mother’s Work Clubs,” sanitation and health campaigns organized by Ann Reeves Jarvis in the 1850s-1870s. Reeves Jarvis’s daughter, Anna Jarvis, usually gets credited as the “founder” of Mother’s Day, because she’s the one who campaigned persistently for years to have it formally declared a national holiday. Woodrow Wilson eventually complied, in 1914. However, the younger Ms. Jarvis quickly disavowed the designation because almost immediately the holiday became tacky and commercial.  She spent most of the rest of her life at war with the floral, candy, and greeting-card industries. She protested Mother’s Day events that she saw as an ugly commercialization of what she had envisioned as a simple, intimate occasion of acknowledgment. She was arrested for disturbing the peace at a convention of the American War Mothers, who were using the holiday to fundraise, selling carnations. She attacked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at a Mother’s Day charity event. She spent all her money on legal battles against those who would seek to profit from Mother’s Day.

She probably took things too far, but I do see her point.

The truth of the holiday is that it’s complicated. The rich reality of the mother-child dynamic is also ambivalent and complex.

It can be fraught, including both deep love and simmering resentment. It’s often riddled with expectations, conscious and unconscious. It can be sugary sweet, and then leave you with such a tart or bitter aftertaste that you can’t un-pucker for hours.

This is most the mother-child relationships I’ve known, anyway — both literal and metaphorical mothering. It’s our actual, interpersonal relationships with and as mothers and mother-figures. And it’s also all the figurative ways that we mother and get mothered.

How we give birth and get born. How we participate in the Creative Process of this ever-evolving Life.

I think our reading will be Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet. It’s been done a lot (so much for originality), but still, it’s darned good:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for Itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, 
Not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows form which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
And He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
So He loves also the bow that is stable.

“Life’s longing for Itself” seems to me a perfect expression of the creative urge, our living process, how we yearn ourselves into the future. Of course this might include actual offspring. AND — I think it applies as well to all our hopes and dreams and desires, our projects and activities, all the ways we participate in creating what comes next.

We can gush with cheap sentiment. Or we can try to protect ourselves by withholding affection and attachment. We might shop our way through the feelings, or post them all over social media. We can wage a lifelong campaign against how it’s been mishandled and refuse to enjoy a minute of it, suffering the complexity. Or we can simply embrace it.

It matters how we receive and hold Life’s longing.  And it matters how we embody and share Life’s Longing.   Our Mother Nature.

I can’t wait to be with you this Sunday, May 10, 10:00am at q-Staff Theater. With the divine Patty Stephens. XO, Drew

©2026 Drew Groves