Sunday, May 11, 2008 Gueco: Our mother By Malu Gueco
HAPPY Mother's Day to all you beautiful women out there. You are and will always be our source of idealism, innovative love and inspiration.
If you ask me who are my sources of motivation in my 24 hours a day. My answer will be quick to draw these roots - coming home to Angeles City means returning to my moms.
Enthusiasm moves my feet, joy enlivens my arms and bliss wraps my heart in complete peace when I know that I will revisit this city of angels. Boosting further my energies is the knowledge that I will return to my home city where I was raised up by my two adoptive moms.
Mama Salem S. Gueco and Mama Nitang B. Tanglao were and are still the source of life's beauty for me. Though they have moved on to eternal Paraiso (Paradise), every day and in every way, I am most inspired by their love, values and teachings.
I also respect my biological mother - Lucia Simbillo- she gave me the best future way back in 1954 with her decision.
I am sure you have your name, source and version of who is the most loving person or persons in your own life.
So, wherever you are and however you celebrate May 11, be sure to honor your mom, mama or ima as you may call her.
U.S.A.
Let us now move on the foreign lands and see how they came to esteem today. Particularly, let us zoom in the U.S.A. terrain and focus on their rites and rituals. Herein are the data from the cyberspace:
"United States celebrates Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Mother's Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War.
However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace.
Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.
When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on 10 May 1908, in the church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Originally the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, this building is now the International Mother's Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on - spreading eventually to 45 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.
Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother's Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother's Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States.
Finale
What a sunny Sunday when we can celebrate it with our beloved mom.
You may treat her to lunch or dinner.. .you may buy her red roses...write a poem for her ...give her a simple gift ....what matters most is that you let her know how much you reciprocate her affection.
Better yet, please, pass it on. This goodness, great benevolence and generous showering of devotion which we inherited from our mama to our next generation....
