Happy Mother's Day.

Before the brunch reservation, before the flowers, before the card — I want to offer you something older. A truer story about why this day exists at all.

Most people think Mother's Day began when Anna Jarvis lobbied Congress in the early 1900s. And she did. But the roots go back further, and deeper, and they are rooted not in sentiment — but in nation-building.

In 1858, a young Appalachian homemaker named Ann Jarvis organized what she called "Mother's Work Days" — community gatherings to improve sanitation, prevent the spread of disease, and keep her neighbors' children alive. When the Civil War tore her community apart, she organized women's brigades that crossed both sides of the line, caring for Confederate and Union soldiers alike. And when the war ended, it was she who took the first steps to heal the bitter rifts between her neighbors. Not the politicians. Not the generals. The mothers.

In 1872, Boston poet and pacifist Julia Ward Howe, still reeling from the carnage of the Franco-Prussian War, asked a question that has never stopped being urgent:

"Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?"

She established a Mother's Day for peace. It was held in Boston and elsewhere for years — until it faded, quietly, in the years just before World War I.

Then Anna Jarvis, the daughter, who had sat in Sunday school at age twelve and heard her mother say, "I hope someone, someday, will found a memorial mother's day — there are many days for men, but none for mothers" — Anna took up that thread. She wrote letters. She organized. She persisted. And in 1914, Congress passed the resolution. President Wilson signed it.

Three women. Three generations of civic courage. A day that began not with brunches, but with bandages, with peace marches, with the unglamorous and essential work of knitting a community back together.

This is what matriarchal governance looks like in practice. Not a title or a throne — but a circle of responsibility, drawn wide enough to include the whole neighborhood, the whole nation, the generations not yet born.

The mothers who built this day understood something that our governance systems still struggle to encode: that the health of the nation is built inside the home first. In how we speak to each other. In what we pass down. In what we refuse to let be forgotten. The kitchen table is a seat of governance. The garden tending lesson is a policy document. The bedtime story is a lineage.

Ann Jarvis didn't wait for permission to build the peace she saw was needed. Neither did Howe. Neither did Anna. They used what they had — their voices, their circles, their relationships — and they changed the world from there.

An invitation for this Sunday

What if this year, you gave yourself something more nourishing than brunch?

Maybe that looks like an hour of true rest — not performing celebration, but receiving it quietly, in your own body.

Maybe it looks like sitting down with your family — your children, your nieces and nephews, the young people in your circle — and telling them one story. Something from your lineage. Something your grandmother knew. A value that has lived in the women of your family for generations, waiting to be named out loud.

Maybe it looks like teaching them one thing from the feminine core: how to repair a relationship, how to hold a grievance without weaponizing it, how to ask for what you need, how to listen until you understand rather than until you can respond.

These are the lessons that build nations. These are the things Ann Jarvis was doing on her Work Days. They don't require a restaurant reservation. They require your presence, your voice, and your willingness to pass something real forward.

That is the Mother's Day worth honoring.

With deep respect for the mothers who came before us, and for all the ways you are building — right now, in your homes and communities — the world we want to live in.

In the circle,
Maija