m day recap

I always thought Mother's Day was simply about cards and flowers for moms. (Witness the above card I made during elementary school back in the 60's.) This weekend I attended a play with Offspring #1 called Found Peace and learned more about the origins of the day. According to information on the program...

"The first North American Mothers' Day was conceptualized with Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870. Despite having penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic 12 years earlier, Howe had become so distraught by the death and carnage of the Civil War that she called on mothers to come together and protest what she saw as the futility of their sons killing the sons of other mothers. With the Proclamation she called for an international Mother's Day celebrating peace and motherhood." (Actually you can read Howe's Proclamation over at Processing Counselor's.)

The play was a collection of scenes dealing with the futility of war and the power of words to create healing and peace. My favorite scene was entitled "Letters Home" which was crafted from real letters from an American soldier in Iraq. Giving these letters an actual face and voice "brought the message home" in a powerful way.

Offspring #2 isn't a theatre-going kind of guy, so we bonded later over Really Big Burritos: