Welcome to Commune, where each week we explore the ideas and practices which bring us together and help us live healthy and purpose-filled

lives.

You've probably figured out that I am not your host, Jeff Krasno.

No, this is Skylar Grand and I'm Mr. Krasno's Better Half and I've deposed Jeff this week in honor of Mother's Day.

Now, my own mother, Anne, bequeathed many things to me, a whole slew of questionable personality traits,

which seemed to be manifesting with increasing frequency the older I get.

And one of the things I definitely inherited from my mom is a distaste for holidays like Mother's Day,

which appear to have been concocted by the chocolate and greeting card industries.

In fact, I don't think I've ever called my mom on Mother's Day, and I don't think she's ever missed it.

To be clear, I love being a mom. I love moms.

So I dug a little deeper into the origins of Mother's Day to see if I was perhaps wrong about my aversion.

And I discovered celebrations of mothers and motherhood can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

And they held festivals in honor of the mother goddesses Ria and Sibel.

But the modern incarnation for Mother's Day is the early Christian festival known as

Mothering Sunday. The origins of Mother's Day in the U.S. date back to the 19th century.

Before the Civil War, Mother's Workday Cl clubs were organized to teach local women how to properly

care for their children, question mark. And these clubs later became a way that people could

come together in parts of the country, especially that were divided after the Civil War.

Apparently, Union and Confederate soldiers couldn't say no to their moms when they insisted they all get together on what was called Mother's Friendship Day.

The feminist precursor to Mother's Day came from the abolitionist and suffrage at Julia Ward Howe.

In 1970, she issued the Mother's Day Proclamation, which was a call to action that rallied mothers to unite in promoting world peace.

Awesome.

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