This Mothers’ Day, as I prefer to spell it, I’ve been haunted by memory of the time when Mother washed my mouth out with soap for using a bad word. No, it wasn’t the f-word.
That was almost 70 years ago, in Houston, not quite the Deep South, but close enough. A few years before–I was likely around nine–she’d already called out that particular F- vocable. When I had asked where babies came from, she’d replied in her typical back-handed way,
“Now, George, I know you know. Don’t you boys snicker about it? It’s a four-letter word beginning with F.”
(For months I held them in, afraid I’d inadvertently inseminate a classmate with a fart.)
No, the word I used a couple of years later was, in her mind, much worse. It began with an N.
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In her own way she was honoring the origins of not Mother’s, but Mothers’ Day.
Lest we forget: the origins of Mother’s Day lie in the 1870 Mothers’ [sic] Day Proclamation, a “pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The appeal was tied to Howe’s feminist conviction that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.”
Mother, who was a proud Unitarian, would have preferred the 1993 version, updated into a hymn by the Unitarian-Universalist Association, this meant to be much more inclusive in both gender references, multicultural sources.
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Last night as we were streaming Riot Women, with fabulous music and lyrics by ARXX (pronounced “arks”). I had a brief moment of positivity about the future.
Politics is shaped by cycles. Maybe things will swing back. Am I allowed to hope that he-who-must-not-be-named is the beginning of dying breath of mindless patriotism, even better of patriarchy?