Why the founder of Mother’s Day once tried to cancel it
💐 The Society of American Florists reports that Mother’s Day is the third-highest revenue-generating day for florists nationwide, behind Valentine’s Day and Christmas
Also today: Seeing through Wes Anderson’s eyes, fearless leadership, and writing good sentences
By Harris Sockel
Little-known fact: Mother’s Day in the U.S. began as a tribute to one mother, Ann Jarvis. A community organizer who raised money to buy medicine and childcare for families in need, she died in 1905 before the second Sunday of May. Her daughter, Anna Jarvis, petitioned Congress for a national Mother’s Day as a way to keep her mom’s memory alive.
Decades later, when Mother’s Day became more about buying flowers and greeting cards than actually connecting with your mom, Jarvis was irate: “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” she fumed. In the ’40s, she actually petitioned to revoke the holiday (!) but by then it had already caught on.
On Medium, you’ll find over 10,000 stories about Mother’s Day, and most go much deeper than the platitudes on a greeting card. J.C. Anne Brown describes what she calls the “emotional fuzzy Velcro” of obligation and guilt some associate with the day. Former Al Jazeera anchor Richelle Carey unpacks the complexity of being an adoptive mom, writing, “I understand the immense responsibility that comes with adoption, particularly because it’s a process that starts with someone else’s difficult choice.”
And here’s essayist Summer Block capturing the essence of a certain stage of motherhood these days: chauffeuring your kids around and feeling like an extra in the movie that is your life. It’s nostalgic and poetic:
The experience of driving a teenager and their friends is like that of being a ghost haunting your own life. I remembered my best friend’s mom, who always picked us up in a wood-paneled navy blue minivan, unfailingly cheerful, always playing the oldies station, always with an open can of Tab in the driver’s seat cup holder, asking if we’d had fun at the pool as we made a lot of loud, giddy jokes and draped sopping wet beach towels all over the upholstery of her car. Was it possible that she, too, was real?
What else we’re reading
- Creative people know that constraints (even arbitrary ones) can help unlock new ways of working. On a trip to Croatia, travel photographer Cynthia A Whelan gave herself the constraint of taking photos in the style of Wes Anderson. “I wanted to see Croatia with a quirky, colorful, theatrical, symmetrical eye,” she explains. Whelan experiments with several Andersonian techniques — including “planimetric staging,” which involves placing the camera at a 90-degree angle to the subject being shot.
- Apparently, most digital maps of China are wrong. Google Maps uses pre-established reference points around the globe corresponding to real-world locations. According to engineer Anastasia Bizyayeva, the Chinese government obfuscates these reference points using an algorithm that shifts their locations by “as little as 50 meters to as much as 500 meters.” (As a result, accurate maps of China can only be created in partnership with Chinese companies.) That’s why Google Maps’ satellite view of downtown Shanghai shows businesses in the middle of the Huangpu River:
From the archive: on fearless leadership
Elizabeth Shassere, author of Becoming a Fearless Leader, lists the telltale signs of fearful leadership. These behaviors are often labeled “bad leadership,” but understanding their connection to fear was helpful to me. Each behavior — like talking at the team instead of with them, or blaming failures on external forces — stems from fear of being “found out” as a fraud. Leadership is hard! Often, incompetence is just fear in disguise.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about unnecessary words
Ninety percent of the time, you can delete the words “I think” to instantly make any sentence stronger.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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