Sunday marks the 115th anniversary of the modern Mother’s Day.
Founded in 1905, by United States woman Anna Jarvis — who was motivated by the death of her own mother that year to campaign for a holiday to honour all mothers - Mother’s Day has spread worldwide.
What started as a celebration of the personal connection between a mother and her children has become a multibillion-dollar, global phenomenon.
Last year, it was reported that New Zealanders spent a combined $265 million on their mothers for the annual, second-Sunday-in-May, celebration. That is about $66 each.
In the years after Mother’s Day took root, Jarvis became quite affronted by the increasing commercialisation of the day. After campaigning for the event, which became an official holiday in the US in 1914, she sued those she believed were profiteering from Mother’s Day and later even agitated to have it removed from the official list of holidays.
More than a century on, it is firmly established on the New Zealand calendar as a day of gifts and love for mum.
Whether it is breakfast in bed and a handmade card, time to herself and a massage voucher, or dinner out in her brand new car, we dream up endless ways of treating our mums.
But, what do Mums really want this Mother’s Day?
The Weekend Mix asked six Otago women to give their answers.
The women come from a range of backgrounds and fulfil a host of roles. Their responses are as fascinating as they themselves are diverse. They want time with family, women to be valued, rainwater in the hot tub, pay equity, good news, a radical new approach to wellbeing ...
Jenna Packer
"I have two sons who I adore — not just from the safety and nostalgia of the empty nest," Packer says.
"Still, when they were small and I was trying to paint in the playdough-encrusted kitchen, I often ended up back in my sketchbooks. Then, they were my last, tenuous link to staying an artist — scrawled drawings of the boys, sometimes with notes. ‘ I want to make a frog out of cardboard and paper’, ‘I want to play with swords and sharp sticks and point them at people’."
Show me the child and I’ll show you the man, Packer quotes. One is flatting in Dunedin. He has gone from cardboard frogs to carved angels "who appear around the city like hooded tagger-gargoyles". The other, now in Wellington, wants to be a knife-maker.
"What do I really want for Mother’s Day? The same as ever — to all be together. That’s my happiest place.
"This year, that’s not going to happen. They’ve moved out and into the world, and that’s where they are under lockdown.
"So far, they are doing OK. It’s the post-lockdown, climate-changing world that is the new, big unknown. As a mother, I’m anxious and hopeful that they and their friends have the imagination and resourcefulness, and the love, to make this into a different, better normal."
Packer is hoping her boys will soon be back home "giving me a hard time for worrying, as I did over pocket-knives and hitching to school on the motorway".
She is hanging out for their bone-crunching hugs.
"I’m cooking and freezing large meals in anticipation."
"Happy Mother's Day, Ma," she concludes, adding, "and other mums in lockdown, wherever you are this year."
Jennifer Shulzitski
For Mother’s Day she wants us all to "truly value women".
"Living through this pandemic, we learned that women are the majority of our essential workforce," Shulzitski says.
"Women nurse our elders, heal our vulnerable, teach our children and dominate our public services. Women outperform in school and university and they invest their income in family and community."
If we truly valued women, their unwaged, low-carbon work would be acknowledged financially, she says. "Our essential labour would warrant a living wage."
Truly valuing women also means valuing girls, she says.
"For Mother’s Day, I want my daughter to be as safe as my sons. (One in four girls are sexually assaulted in New Zealand). We must believe our girls and women as survivors of violence. We must teach our boys and men to respect the independence and power of girls and women."
If we truly value women, we will also "listen to the wahine of Aotearoa".
"The voices of Pania Newton and Renae Maihi speak to the feminine power of social and environmental justice," Shulzitski says.
"On Mother’s Day, I want to acknowledge the connection between colonisation, patriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, the climate crisis and the record inequality in 2020.
"But if we truly value women, we can change everything."
Jacinta Ruru
The University of Otago law faculty professor would also like enough rainwater to fill the outside hot tub.
"Six weeks of being at home has left our water tanks empty for the first time in nine years," Prof Ruru says.
But what she is most looking forward to on Mother’s Day is "a day with my kids, Ariana and Nicholas, and my niece Olivia, enjoying homemade cards and autumn fruit dishes".
She hopes it will be a calm sunny day.
"The tides aren’t quite right for a high-tide, Purakaunui estuary, paddle but a morning walk on Long Beach and perhaps an afternoon walk in the hills would be great."
Time with her mum is also in the offing.
"I’m lucky, I really have everything I want."
Looking ahead, Prof Ruru has in mind a plan for future Mother’s Days.
"Something I’ve always wanted to do for is to help create a movement to fill empty shoeboxes with beautiful gifts to drop off at Women’s Refuge, and more broadly to solo mums, to acknowledge the extraordinary role of mums, especially those in adverse circumstances."
Jocelyn Harris
"At my advanced age," says the Emerita Professor of English Literature, "I’m more in the business of throwing out stuff so that my children won’t have to.
"My most precious possessions have no commercial value, such as the Tinky Winky Teletubby pressed into my hands by an expat grandchild struck speechless by my departure."
What Prof Harris really wants is the big stuff. Justice, fairness, and all that.
"I want what distinguished ex-Prime Minister Jim Bolger calls ‘a radical new approach’.
"Neo-liberalism, or the championing of a free market, has failed," she says, paraphrasing Bolger’s comments in the previous Weekend Mix, "creating massively unequal growth. Some people have become grossly wealthy, while others only survive from pay cheque to pay cheque".
Prof Harris asks, what has happened to our country?
"When I was a child, wealth seemed to be more evenly distributed - except, of course, to women. Competitive individualism now rules, American-style, so that foodbanks barely cope, and CEOs are said to ‘earn’ multimillion-dollar salaries.
"And yet even the most ardent individualists, locked behind high walls with keypads, must want a society where everyone is educated, healthy, and well-paid, so that they and their families won’t get sick or come home to robbers."
That inequality, here and everywhere, is being worsened by the climate emergency, she says.
"So, for Mother’s Day, what I really want for all mothers as well as myself is immediate, courageous action to tackle global heating. We lost the chance to stop it altogether, but maybe we can slow it down. By making us reconsider how we live, Covid-19 shows us what to do."
Kate Wilson
For herself, on the Strath-Taieri where she lives, Wilson wants "to wake to an awesome red-sky morning, walk the dogs as the first sun hits the mountain, sip a cafe coffee earned biking there, then a stroll around salt lake, all interspersed with snippets of National Radio, followed by lunch with my amazing mother-in-law, provided by my husband and children".
All this is achievable in her level 3 bubble, "except our son visiting".
And even if it rains, a walk with the dogs and the possibility of glimpsing a rainbow "is still so good".
Turning her thoughts to the nation, Wilson hopes a new normal will mean people place greater value on being able to be active, will take time to wonder at nature, embrace family and friends, make life real and simple, but be prepared to change.
"What I really want, is to hear good interviews — which means nothing on POTUS, nothing about professional sports teams not playing, but definitely scientists sharing their discoveries, artists pushing the boundaries being creative — and real New Zealanders’ everyday lives being worthy of reporting and gratitude for those often low-paid who make a real difference to our lives.
"As a mother, that is the sort of world I hope my children grow to appreciate."
Sheree Mason
"It’s an important day; a chance to reflect on the role mothers play and, for mothers, to reflect on how they have tried to nurture their children," Mason, who is a District Health Board administration employee, says.
"Even if you don’t have a lot of material things, if you’ve been able to give care and love, that counts for so much."
Sheree has more reasons than many to hope the national lockdown does not prevent the generations mingling at this time. As a daughter and a mother, she, like many women, wants to mark the day set aside to honour motherhood by spending time with her elderly mother and with her adult twin sons. On top of that, the days immediately following Mothers’ Day are full of family birthdays in the Mason household. Her mother’s birthday is the day after Mothers’ Day and her twins’ birthday is a couple of days later.
Mason also hopes Mother’s Day will bring progress on the Public Service Association’s claim for pay equity for clerical and administration workers employed by District Health Boards.
A local union delegate for the past 13 years, she has supported efforts to have their claim recognised and settled.
"I’m looking forward to a good outcome for everyone," she said, hopefully.
