How is it that Anna May Jarvis, the mother of Mother’s Day, spent many years of her life as well as her fortune campaigning against Mother’s Day? What does the author say about mothers in America, and the mothers in his family as well?

    When Anna May Jarvis’s mother died on the second Sunday of May, 1906, Anna May and America were changed forever.
     Like most of us, Anna had ignored the warning “Lavish（慷慨给予）your flowers on the living, not the dead.” ¹ Now, driven by remorse（悔恨）, the gentle, easygoing Anna May had one obsession（顽念）— to see her mother and motherhood honored throughout the world.
     After a year’s planning, the first Mother’s Day was celebrated on the second anniversary of her mother’s death, May 10, 1908, at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna’s mother had taught Sunday School.
     Anna was still not content and a year later, Philadelphia became the first city to proclaim（宣布）an official Mother’s Day. Three years after that, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed Public Resolution 25, establishing forever the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
Ironically, Anna May Jarvis then retired from her insurance company job to spend the remaining 34 years of her life, as well as her fortune of over 100,000 dollars, campaigning against Mother’s Day!
     From day one, Mother’s Day had become a great commercial extravaganza （铺张）to boost the incomes of card and candy makers, and a salve（止痛药） to soothe（安慰）the consciences of those who each May made their mothers “queens for the day” while neglecting them the other 364 days.²
Anna May complained, “Mother’s Day has nothing to do with candy. Candy is junk（废品）.”
     “A maudlin, insincere printed card or a ready-made telegram means nothing except that you’re too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone else in the world.³ You ought to go home and see your mother on Mother’s Day. You ought to take her out and paint the town red…⁴
     “You ought to give her something useful, something permanent… Is she sleeping warm at night? Could she use an eiderdown（鸭绒被）? Maybe the stairs in her home need fixing…”
     For 30 years Anna May championed the integrity of mother’s Day⁵, until old, tired, deaf, blind and penniless, she was placed in a West Chester, Pennsylvania, sanitarium（疗养院）, where she died—unmarried, and never a mother!
     Fifty years later, mothers may be more neglected than ever. Sadly, over one-half of retired American mothers live in penury（贫困）. They do indeed deserve something more permanent than cards and candy one day a year and anonymity（默默无闻）the other 364.
     Only now, as a father, am I slowly beginning to appreciate motherhood. As I watch my wife, in both sickness and health, unselfishly spend herself on her two sons (and her husband as well!), I am moved by the glorious gift of motherhood. Each day I love more deeply the young mother I married—and by my own mother who now lives in retirement so far away in the hills of Tennessee.
My wife too increasingly appreciates her own mother’s struggles in raising two sons and a daughter in Taiwan while her husband taught College English to Chinese students for over 30 years. Amazingly, even to this day, when both of our mothers should be enjoying their well-deserved retirement, they spend much more time caring for their children and grandchildren than we do for them!
     The hardest thing about living in China may be the difficulty of fully expressing appreciation and concern for parents 12,000 miles away. Like most “modern” Western youths, we send the obligatory Mother’s Day card, and we write faithfully, but is this enough?
     The past two years we have paid the expenses for Sue’s parents to visit us in Xiamen. Though we live in China, half way around the world from our mothers, this is at least one way we can work to “Give our flowers to the living, not the dead.”
     Today, as Mother’s Day catches on in China, let us labor to make every day special for all mothers, ⁶ both in China and abroad. Let’s make Mother’s Day not just a card-and-candy substitute for well-deserved love but rather the crown and pinnacle（顶峰）of a full year’s expression of love and appreciation for those who gave us life: mothers. ⁷

(678 words)