motherhood – Dan Harper

Changing Views of Motherhood

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

Readings

The first reading was the poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats,” by the Unitarian poet Sylvia Plath.

The second reading was a poem titled “Mother’s Day” by Bruce Lansky, from his book If Pigs Could Fly and Other Deep Thoughts: A Collection of Funny Poems.

Sermon

The past decade or so in the United States has been an interesting time for those of us who consider ourselves to be feminists. Feminism has become a bad word, a pejorative term, so much so that now when I use the word I have to define what I mean. It actually has a very simple definition. A feminist is someone who believes that all genders are equally worthy as human beings. A feminist is someone who does not believe that there is one gender that is stronger, smarter, more authoritative than other genders. Or, as we used to say back in the 1990s, a feminist is someone who believes that women and girls are just as good as men and boys.

For us Unitarian Universalists, feminism also has a religious dimension. We are the inheritors of the Universalist tradition. The old-time Universalists decided that if God really was good, then God would extend God’s love to all persons everywhere. These days, not all Unitarian Universalists believe in God; but regardless of our belief or lack of belief in God, we still remain convinced that all persons are equally worthy as human beings. Because of this, Unitarian Universalists almost have to be feminists — because of our religious worldview, we will affirm your inherent worthiness and dignity no matter what your gender is.

Those of us who are feminists have a perspective on motherhood that differs in some respects from non-feminists. If you’re a feminist, you tend to see each woman or girl as an individual, as a separate and unique human being with distinctive talents and abilities. Traditionally, there was a tendency to equate motherhood and womanhood — if you’re a woman, then you have to be a mother. But those of us who are feminists recognize that the universe is more complicated than that. Some women want to be mothers, some women don’t want to become mothers, some women are ambivalent about motherhood, some women cannot become mothers regardless of their wishes. Just because a person is a woman, it does not mean they must be a mother. Our feminist worldview has changed our understanding of motherhood.

I became very aware that I’m a feminist during last year’s presidential election cycle. This awareness hit me especially hard during the childless cat lady kerfluffle. If you’ve forgotten the childless cat lady kerfluffle, let me remind you of how it played out. Back in 2021, J. D. Vance claimed that the United States is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”(1) That is a direct quote taken from a video clip. The video clip of Vance saying this was posted on Twitter, and caused a bit of a buzz across various social media outlets. Perhaps the most notable social media buzz occurred when Taylor Swift posted a reply on social media in which she openly proclaimed herself a childless cat lady.

Now it turns out that the cat-lady trope is not a new invention. According to Dr. Corey Wrenn, lecturer in sociology at the University of Kent, Great Britain, there is a long history of stereotyping feminists as cat ladies. Over a hundred years ago, women were seeking the right to vote were portrayed as cats in anti-suffragette propaganda. According to Corey Wrenn, “anti-suffrage postcards often used [cats] to reference female activists. The intent was to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement.”(2)

Knowing this helps give us some more insight into the cat lady we heard about in the first reading this morning, in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats.” Before I talk about that poem, I have to tell you a little something about Sylvia Plath. First, of particular interest to us, Plath was a Unitarian: she grew up in Unitarian churches; in college, she described herself an “agnostic humanist”; and in her twenties, she called herself “a pagan Unitarian at best.”(3) Second, Plath was born in 1932, and based on what I’ve seen of that generation of Unitarian women (which includes what I saw of my Unitarian mother), I’d say many of those women were strong-minded feminists, even if they didn’t describe themselves using the term “feminist.” In short, Plath was both a Unitarian and a feminist; that is to say, in terms of her worldview, she was one of us.

Plath’s short life — she died at age 30 — was not an easy life. While still a girl, she showed promise as a writer. But after a summer internship in college, she had a major depressive episode which culminated in a six month hospitalization. After recovering her health, she went to study in England on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met the poet Ted Hughes. They married, but Hughes turned out to be an abuser who physically assaulted her; he also conducted affairs with other women. After the birth of her second child, Plath separated from Hughes, only to die by suicide less than a year later.

I know, this is a pretty grim story for a Mother’s Day sermon. I apologize.

So on a more positive note, let’s consider Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and her Eleven Cats.” This is a poem that’s both funny and serious. When the unnamed narrator of the poem was a girl, she and her friends used to go to spy on Ella Mason. They would peer into Ella Mason’s house, where they could see her eleven cats purring around her — this is the funny bit, with little girls peering in to Ella’s house to stare at all the happy cats. The little girls giggled when they saw the cats purring on antimacassars. The girls had heard that when Ella Mason was young, she had been a fashionable beauty, and so they make fun of her because by conventional standards Ella had thrown away her opportunity to get married. Now Ella is old, and she has to settle for the love and admiration of eleven cats. But in the final stanza of the poem, the girls have grown up, and as they begin to marry they look upon Ella Masson more kindly. They realize that they had misunderstood Ella Mason. Ella did not suffer from vanity, as the girls had assumed, but instead Ella possessed a sense of self-respect which allowed her to realize that in her case, her happiness did not require marriage.(4)

The point of the poem is not that every woman should become a cat lady. Nor is the point of the poem that every woman should get married and have children. The point — as I see it — is that each of us has choices about how we’re going to live our lives. Many people make their life choices based on the expectations of society, while others among us make our choices based on knowing our deepest selves. Sometimes someone winds up making a choice that society disapproves of — when, for example, a woman chooses not to get married, causing little girls peer in her front door and giggle at her — but when they make that choice based on a deep knowledge of self, they are able to ignore the the disapproval of other people. In fact, given the diversity of opinion in human communities, no matter what choice you make, you can be fairly sure that someone is going to disapprove of it. Thus it is always best to make your choices based on a deep knowledge of who you really are.

I see something of a parallel between Ella Mason and Taylor Swift. Swift, who is now 36 years old, has thus far chosen to focus on her career instead of marrying and/or having children. She knows that there are people who disapprove of her for not following a conventional path and putting aside her music to become a mother; but she also knows herself well enough to know that she is being true to her self. When Swift saw J. D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” because she knew who she was and why she had made the choices she had made, she was able to post a very measured response on Instagram (in which she urged her followers to register to vote). And she was secure enough in her own self that she could sign her post “Taylor Swift / Childless Cat lady.”(5)

So why am I talking so much about childless cat ladies on Mother’s Day? The point I’m trying to make is that there are quite a few people in our country who feel that the single most important role for all women is to bear children and be mothers. People with this viewpoint seem to find it quite threatening when some women — like Taylor Swift — prioritize their careers, putting off motherhood, or maybe choosing not to become mothers at all. They say they have a good reason to feel threatened: they see that the birthrate is falling in the United States, and they worry that the future of the human race is threatened by women who don’t have children. But I suspect that they are really worried because the old gender norms to which they have grown accustomed seem to be fading out — those old gender norms that say the primary purpose of women is to bear children and be mothers. And so they grow anxious when they see women who prioritize something other than motherhood.

By contrast, we Unitarian Universalists do not assume that just because someone is a woman, their primary duty is to bear children and become a mother. We are also quite aware that some women who might want to become mothers cannot do so, for a wide variety of reasons. We are also aware that there are many different ways to become a mother: there are mothers who give birth to a child, there are mothers who adopt a child, there a mothers who become a mother by marrying someone who already has children.

And finally, we even understand that there can be many kinds of mothers. For example, there are people who serve as mothers to children who are not their biological children, adopted children, or step-children. Sylvia Plath had a biological mother, but she also had a literary mother. The Unitarian novelist Olive Higgins Prouty adopted Plath as a kind of literary child, paying for Plath’s college education and paying for Plath’s medical expenses during her first hospitalization for mental illness.(6) Or in another example, some decades ago I knew a teenaged girl who had a difficult home life and got her mothering from a woman in her church community who was not her biological mother; this girl spent as much time as she could in this other woman’s household (and sadly, this teenager’s biological mother was actually glad that the girl spent so many of her waking hours away from their home; not everyone enjoys motherhood).

As feminists, we understand that men can also be mothers. I remember a gay couple I once knew who had adopted children, and both men in that couple served as both mothers and fathers to their children. But I also think of a co-worker of mine back in the 1980s whose mother had died when he was an infant; from the way he talked about his upbringing, it was clear that his father had been both a father and mother to him. Most non-feminists probably wouldn’t admit that men can be mothers; but the evidence of my own experience shows that men can indeed serve as mothers.

Once you adopt a feminist viewpoint, the category of “mother” becomes a little bit broader than just a biological woman who has biological offspring. Mind you, we who are feminists acknowledge the great importance of those women who physically give birth to infants. Giving birth is crucially important, it can put a huge strain on a woman’s body, and we are grateful for women who choose to give birth. But we also understand that motherhood, broadly construed, means more than physically giving birth. Motherhood encompasses all of the intensive nurturing that a human being needs to grow from infancy into adulthood; and this includes both physical, emotional, and spiritual nurture.

It is actually quite astonishing how much nurture human beings need to get from infancy to adulthood. In contemporary Western culture, we like to pretend that all that nurture can be provided by a nuclear family with one mother and one father, but that really isn’t true. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that it takes a much bigger community than that to provide the nurture that children and teens require. Lawrence Mbogoni, a retired professor from William Paterson University who was raised rural Tanzania, put it this way:

“[The proverb] ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’ reflects a social reality some of us who grew up in rural areas of Africa can easily relate to. As a child, my conduct was a concern of everybody, not just my parents, especially if it involved misconduct. Any adult had the right to rebuke and discipline me and would make my mischief known to my parents…. The concern of course was the moral well-being of the community.”(7)

While Lawrence Mbogoni was speaking specifically of rural Africa, the same principle applies more generally to all human beings and all human communities. It does in fact take a whole village to raise a child. In rural Tanzania, that community was the village in which the Mbogoni family lived. In the industrialized West, where villages no longer exist except in fantasy, it is more difficult to find a community of adults who will help raise children and teens, who can help provide all the nurture that a child or teenager needs.

But such communities do exist, and our First Parish congregation is one such intergenerational community. As a community, we know that a central part of our identity is to be the whole village that raises a child. We do not want to supplant a child’s own parents, but we are here to support and help parents. We see this happening at social hour, where there are many adults, not just parents, who know the names of First Parish children and who talk with the children. We see this in our Religious Education Committee, which includes two people who do not have children in the Sunday school, a grandparent-age person, and a high school student. We see this in programs like the current pen-pal program, where kids and adults get to know one another through exchanging weekly pen-pal letters. We are doing our best to be the kind of village that it takes to raise a child.

This is how we help support motherhood. And our support of motherhood is firmly rooted in our feminist worldview. Our feminist worldview helps us understand that the rest of us can help take a little bit of pressure off the biological and adoptive mothers who are part of our community. Those biological and adoptive mothers know that they can come here to First Parish and for a couple of hours each week there will be a whole community of other adults who will help look after their children. Because if it takes a village to raise a child, that implies that motherhood is more than a full-time job for one person.

Without denying the importance of biological and adoptive mothers (some of whom may be men), we recognize that entire communities also provide mothering. In such communities, the mothering provided by biological and adoptive mothers is supplemented by the mothering provided by elders who may be other people’s grandparents; by young adults who may still be thinking about whether or not to have children of their own; by child-free couples like my wife and I; and, yes, by childless cat ladies. We have embraced a changed definition of motherhood, where nurturing children is the responsibility — not just of two parents in a nuclear family — but rather of an entire village, and entire community,.

So on this Mother’s Day, we honor and support biological and adoptive mothers. We also honor communities that provide the additional nurture that children need; we embrace the proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child.”

Notes

(1) My transcription of a video clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing J. D. Vance in 2021, as posted on X / Twitter by Ron Filipowski @RonFilipkowski on 22 July 2024 https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1815503440983867598 accessed 9 May 2025.
(2) Corey Wrenn, “Woman-as-Cat in Anti-Suffrage Propaganda,” posted on 4 December 2013 in the Sociological Images category on The Society Pages website https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/12/04/the-feminization-of-the-cat-in-anti-suffrage-propaganda/ accessed 9 May 2025.
(3) Details of Plath’s Unitarianism and personal theology from Wesley Hromatko, “Plath, Syliva,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/plath-sylvia/ accessed 10 May 2025.
(4) I’m basing my interpretation of the poem’s last stanza on Valerie Doris Frazier, Battlemaids of Domesticity: Domestic Epic in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Slyvia Plath (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Georgia, 2002), pp. 119-120. Frazier writes: “When the speaker grasps at an answer for Miss Ella’s unmarried state, a sense of tension erupts in the last lines. Miss Ella’s flaw is apparently vanity, as the young women of the town have learned. But those in the town have misread the textual meaning, for there is a significant distinction between Narcissism and self-love. For narcissism means vanity or love for one’s physical body, but self-love which takes on a spiritual rather than physical quality means a concern for one’s happiness.”
(5) Swift’s Instagram post, which includes a photo of her holding a cat, is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_wtAOKOW1z/
(6) Hromatko; see also Lynn Gordon Hughes, “Prouty, Olive Higgins,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist Study Network https://www.uudb.org/prouty-olive-higgins/ accessed 10 May 2025.
(7) Lawrence Mbogoni as quoted by Joel Goldberg, “It Takes A Village To Determine The Origins Of An African Proverb,” on the “Goats and Soda: Stories of Life in a Changing World” blog on the National Public Radio website, 30 July 2016 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/30/487925796/it-takes-a-village-to-determine-the-origins-of-an-african-proverb accessed 10 May 2025.

Mother’s Peace Day

Readings

The first reading was the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” by Julia Ward Howe:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

The second reading was from “Gitanjali 35” by Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom… let my country awake.

Sermon: “Mother’s Peace Day”

It appears that the very first mention of Mother’s Day dates back to 1870. Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian and author of the popular Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” had grown horrified at the actual results of war. She was horrified by how many young men were killed or disabled by war, but she was also horrified by what war did to the moral character of those who fought. A mother herself, she wrote in her proclamation for Mother’s Peace Day: “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.” Thus she issued her historic call for all mothers everywhere to come together in an international congress of women in order to promote world peace.

After that initial proclamation of Mothers Peace Day in 1870, the idea of a day for mothers to take action together was forgotten until 1907. In that year, an Episcopalian laywoman named Anna Jarvis organized a worship service for mothers at her church in West Virginia. She did so in part to honor her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, who had been a peace activist who had worked with Julia Ward Howe, and had supported Howe’s original idea for a Mother’s Peace Day. So our modern Mother’s Day began with a worship service in 1907, which had been inspired by Julia Ward Howe’s original vision of Mother’s Peace Day.

Since 1907, Mother’s Day has continued to evolve. By the mid-twentieth century, Mother’s Day was not centered on a church service. It had become a holiday that upheld a view of women then permeating American society: a woman was supposed to get married young, have lots of children, and subsume her identity in motherhood. This mid-twentieth century myth of motherhood ignored all the women who chose not to marry, or who were unable to have children, or didn’t become mothers for whatever reason. Unfortunately, when Mother’s Day became a day to uphold that old mid-twentieth century myth of motherhood, the original purpose of the day was forgotten. No longer were mothers actively taking control of the destiny of the world. Instead of mothers coming together as peace activists, mothers were supposed to be passive recipients of cards and flowers from their children and husbands. If they were lucky, mothers got taken out to lunch; at least then there was one less meal they had to cook and clean up after.

During the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, some feminists began to criticize Mother’s Day: why should women be reduced to being mothers? Why couldn’t we value women for all their contributions to society? These were needed criticisms, helping society to understand that women could be more than stereotypical mothers. At the same time, it turned out that many feminists happened to like Mother’s Day. We liked the thought that there might be a special connection between a mother and the children to whom she had given birth. We liked giving cards or flowers to our mothers. We liked the thought of taking our mothers out to lunch — although in my family, my mother, being a thrifty New England Yankee, was resistant to buying lunch in a restaurant.

In the twenty-first century, Mother’s Day continued to evolve and change. We began to re-evaluate the American myth of motherhood. We began to expand our understanding of what it meant to be a mother. We had already heard from women who had adopted their children, who had pointed out that their connection with their children was just as special as that of biological mothers. At the start of the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of same sex couples began having children, and male couples began to point out that they provided the mothering that their children wanted and needed. In the past decade, increasing numbers of transgender and non-binary people began having children, and they too have pointed out that mothering is not limited to just one gender.

And in the past half century, we have also learned to adopt the the perspective of children when we think about motherhood. For some children, their fathers provide more mothering than their mothers. Some children have cold or distant parents, and get their mothering from people who are not their parents. There are of course a great many children who do get mothering from their biological or adoptive mothers, but we began to understand that those children can get mothering not just from their mothers, but from other people in their lives — fathers and aunts and older siblings and teachers and so on.

We have expanded our understanding of motherhood, and this has come about in part because we have expanded our understanding of gender. It used to be that our society took it for granted that biological sex, gender identity, and gender role were all the same thing. Indeed, some conservative Christians still believe that if your biological sex is female then you are female, and many states in the South are passing laws that uphold this conservative Christian notion of sex gender. Many of those conservative Christians also believe that all women should be ruled by biological males, and should stay at home to raise children; these conservative Christians want to go back to that mid-twentieth century stereotype that the only appropriate role for a biological female is to be a mother.

However, the rest of our society has come to understand that biological sex, gender identity, and gender role can be quite separate. For example — and this is an example that gets the most press these days — our society is coming to understand that there are transgender people whose biological sex happens to be different from their gender identity. But our society is also coming to accept that people can take on a gender role that is different from their biological sex or their gender identity. We are coming to understand that man can be nurturing and can even take on the role of mothering; we are coming to understand that people who do not have children of their own can take on the role of nurturing and mothering.

We are slowly expanding our understanding motherhood to include a wider range of actual experiences. Of course we still celebrate biological females who give birth to new human beings. But now we can also celebrate those biological females who do not fit comfortably into the gender role of nurturing female, and we can also celebrate the biological males who take on the role of a nurturing mother. We can celebrate people of any gender identity, of any biological sex, who take on the gender role of mothering.

This helps us to expand Julia Ward Howe’s original idea of Mother’s Peace Day. Howe knew that anyone who had been a mother would not want to send their child off to war. Anyone who had been a mother would not want to see their child killed or maimed or traumatized by the horrors of war. That is why she ended the original Mother’s Peace Day Proclamation with these words: “I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” Howe’s idea is quite logical and straightforward: If she could just gather all the mothers of the world together in one great room, surely they could find a way to put an end to war. She was thinking about just those biological females who happened to have given birth, but why not include in that gathering all those who people who have filled some sort of mothering, nurturing role? The more people we can find who have filled a nurturing mothering role, the more people there are who will feel committed to ending war.

This might include people who would never be called mothers. Take me, for example. I’m a biological male, my gender identity is male, I’ve never had children of my own. Yet I spent a couple of decades doing religious education, and in my own way I helped raise two or three generations of young people. And there are quite a few people like me, people who didn’t exactly do any mothering, but who wound up doing a lot of nurturing. When add together all the mothers with the non-mothers who did a lot of nurturing, that adds up to a great many people who have put a lot of effort into helping the next generation grow up. And we would all prefer it if the next generation were not killed or maimed or traumatized by war.

I like to think that Julia Ward Howe would have welcomed no just women but nurturing people of all genders to her “general congress of women without limit of nationality.” I suspect Julia Ward Howe would have given the women and mothers the seats of honor in the front of the congress. But she would have welcomed anyone dedicated to keeping our children safe — people of all genders; teachers and social workers and doctors and anyone who nurtured others; aunts and uncles and cousins and older siblings and anyone who didn’t happen to have children of their own but helped raise and nurture children — anyone who has contributed to raising up the next generations. I think Julia Ward Howe would welcomed us all to her great congress.

And to me, this remains the central meaning of Mother’s Day. Not that any of this should interfere with your traditional celebration of Mother’s Day. Do whatever it is that you usually do on Mother’s Day: call your mom, let your children take you out to lunch, take your spouse out to lunch, ignore the whole thing. I don’t mean any of this to interfere with your celebration of Mother’s Day, but perhaps the thought of Julia Ward howe and Mother’s Peace Day will add to your celebration. If we were all better at mothering, perhaps the world would be a better, more peaceful place. If our world leaders learned some mothering skills, if they allowed themselves to be more nurturing, perhaps we would have fewer wars. Maybe that’s too much to ask — it’s hard for me to imagine that Vladimir Putin knows what it is to nurture others. But what if he could change? What if he could become empathetic? What if he could forget his own egotistical ambitions and learn to how to selflessly nurture those people who are not as strong or powerful as he?

What if all our world leaders learned how to be empathetic and nurturing? That is, what if all world leaders lived up to the late nineteenth century ideal of motherhood? What if Julia Ward Howe’s great congress of mothers had actually gathered, and had actually taken on real power? We can imagine that such a congress would have focused on how to nurture and raise the next generation. And if our governments were formed with the goal of nurturing and raising the next generation, perhaps we would finally put an end to war.

Of course Julia Ward Howe’s great congress of mothers was not able to take control of world affairs in 1870. Given the rampant sexism of the time, it was too much to expect that a congress of mothers could in fact take over the world. Nor are the chances for a great congress of mothers much better in today’s world.

That does not mean that we should lose all hope. We can start small. We can honor and support empathetic nurturing wherever we may find it. We can honor every person in our lives who nurtures others with empathy. There are people of all genders who nurture others with empathy. There are people of all ages who nurture others with empathy. Both parents and non-parents can be nurturing influences in the lives of others. We can honor all these people, and we can support them in their efforts to raise the next generation — to raise up a generation that in its turn will be more nurturing and empathetic than we are today. Perhaps one day, everyone will know the central skills of mothering — nurturing, empathy, and kindness.

Until that time comes, may we continue to honor the mothers among us. Those of us who had empathetic nurturing mothers can honor their roles in our lives, and if our mothers are still alive we can send them a card or maybe even take them out to lunch. Those of us who have a spouse who is a mother can honor our spouse. All of us can remember and honor all those people in our lives who helped to nurture us.

And so may I wish all the mothers among us a happy Mother’s Day. May you be honored for all you do, and all you have done. And in the spirit of the original Mother’s Peace Day, may your example of mothering be an inspiration to the rest of the world — so that together we may, in the words of Julia Ward Howe, “take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace.”