May 18, 2023 • 31 mins
Continuing our grand tradition of being a bit late to things, we celebrate Mother's Day with an exploration of the multiple women -- activists, poets, and heroes -- responsible for creating a tradition that continues across the world in the modern day. Bonus points if you call your Mom right after listening.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the
(00:27):
show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in, and happy belated Mother's Day to all the
mothers out there. There's a super producer, Max.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Ben Noel, you.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Know, and you're my brother from another mother. Both of you,
the both of yous gonna lump you into that fun
alliterative rhyming phrase.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
We're also in typical ridiculous history fashion doing a show
about a holiday several days after it occurred.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
I take it back. A brother from another mother isn't
really a literative at all. It's just more of a
rhyming thing. It's got a nice internal rhyme, it rolls
off the tongue and has a good mouth feel, But
alliterative it is not. Ben, We're here again talking about
a holiday that was started with all great intention. Like
(01:22):
many holidays, you know, whether it be to honor a
deity of some sort, perhaps a member of the human species,
such as a mother or a father, and then you know, typically,
like the way of most holidays, we see the co
opting by interests, special interest groups aka corporations and people
(01:42):
that want to make money off of stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a very well intentioned event that the
best way to say it is the creator of Mother's
Day has a very complex relationship with Mother's Day.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, let's introduce Mother Jarvis. That's the street name for
Anne Reeves Jarvis. She is a homemaker in Appalachia. She
teaches Sunday school and Anne is born in eighteen thirty two.
She lives a long, full life. She is an activist.
(02:21):
She's a radical in her.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Way, like Ninja Turtles radical or like extreme. Well, I
guess that could be applied to the same.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
She's bodacious.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
She's bodacious. Yes, she hangs ten. But she's also a
cowabungo tour she's an activist.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
You're right.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
This is something in a post Civil war era that
she has decided that she wants to place some emphasis
on honoring the work of mothers, you know, while we
the men were away. You know, it's the same thing
like Rosie the Riveter and all that stuff, like the
idea of holding down the fort while the young men
are away fighting and potentially dying during the war.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So let's give mothers their due. Yeah, and let's also
educate them. Let's help them. Let's help mothers, especially impoverished
mothers in Appalachia. Let's help them be set up for success.
She was very concerned about the perilously high infant mortality rate.
There were very, very serious problems that predated the Civil War,
(03:23):
but they were exacerbated by that bloody conflict. She also
organized women's brigades. She encouraged women to help each other out,
regardless whether they were fighting for the Union or the Confederacy.
And then she start she proposed something called a Mother's
Friendship Day to promote peace between former Union and Confederate families.
(03:46):
Now that's a tall milkshake. There's a lot of blood
on the hands there, no.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Question, And just to not really walk back what I said,
but I mean, she did want to highlight, you know,
how important the work of mothers and women were during
this time. But to your point, Ben, it really was
much more of a functional, organizing kind of effort, wasn't
it like to provide resources to help you curtail some
(04:11):
of these shocking statistics.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, and we do want to note this is very important.
It's kind of like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Or
a story of royals. The person we're talking about, Mother Jarvis,
full name Anne Maria Reeves Jarvis. She is different. She's
a different person entirely from her daughter, Anna Marie Jarvis,
(04:34):
who will come up later. So Anne is the mom
and Anna is the daughter. We've got to introduce a
third person here, a second woman that was very influential
in the founding and Mother's day.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Julia Ward Howe a poet and she knew it. Also
a reformer. During the Civil War, she was an active
volunteer in the very important and new US Sanitary Commission.
This was in order to provide sterilization hygienic environments in hospitals,
(05:08):
to make sure that folks who were sick and wounded
from injuries and war conditions were taken care of properly,
and that going into a hospital wasn't in and of itself,
a death sentence. If you go into a hospital with
a severe wound or illness and it's not been cleaned
or it's not been you know, sterilized, you could emerge
(05:32):
from that hospital worse than you came in, or not
emerge at all.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah, it can get infected, You can intercepsist all kinds
of nasty things can happen. In eighteen sixty one, Julia
Ward Howe also writes the famous Civil War anthem, the
Battle Hymn of the Republic, and was talking briefly, who
was I think it was our how Robert Evans on Twitter,
(05:58):
old friend of the show.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
He just you guys wild.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
He was on Twitter, and I think he must have
just overheard this song because he all he posted, without
much of an explanation, was the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Has no right to slap this hard.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, it kind of a banker. And she wrote it.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
It gets published February of eighteen sixty two, and then
she does another predecessor of Mother's Day In eighteen seventy,
Julia Ward Howe says, we need a Mother's.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Day for peace.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
It's just celebrating the idea of peace, celebrating the idea
that there could be a future without.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
War totally and let's just be you know, of course,
mothers are the source of all life, of human life.
This is an obvious, no brainer statement, but one that
I think often gets overlooked. So it makes sense to
kind of feature the idea of the mother, you know,
as a central kind of force of creation as opposed
(06:57):
to death and destruction, of a counter to some of
the horrifying conditions of war. So she kind of put out,
I guess, sort of a not really a manifesto, more
of a declaration, a proclamation literally, called the Mother's Day
Proclamation in eighteen seventy. She felt that mothers had the
(07:19):
power to prevent war, you know, just through their actions
and through the way they raised their children and sort
of the ideals that they instill into their into their offspring.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, like when jay Z's mom told him to not
talk trash about nas so much. Moms can stop stuff.
Moms exercise a great power over the world, and it's
it's a noble thing for Julia Ward how to recognize
right and to leverage and her version of Mother's Day
(07:53):
was actually stuck around in a bunch of cities, in
Boston in particular, for three decades, but in the years
leading up to World War One it kind of petered out,
and there it stayed until nineteen oh seven. From right
before World War One till around nineteen oh seven, there
(08:15):
wasn't really a Mother's Day. People just hopefully people were
just nice to their moms every.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Day, one would hope and enter our tertiary hero here,
I guess the aforementioned Anna M. Jarvis of Philadelphia, the
daughter of Mother Jarvis, the og Mother's Day banner bearer.
I guess you could call a standard bearer, right, Anna M. Jarvis.
(08:42):
After her mother had passed in nineteen o six, Jarvis
the younger, she decided to memorialize her mother's life and
works by campaigning for a national recognition of a Mother's
Day of a sort. She said that she hoped and
(09:03):
prayed that someone sometime will found a memorial Mother's Day
commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity
in every field of life because, and Jarvis said, she
is entitled to it.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Yeah, and we're getting we're getting a lot of this
from the Forgotten History of Mother's Day by Heidi stone Hill.
And there are a couple other sources we don't want
to shout out quite yet because they might spoil the turn.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
There was a turn here. There's always a turn.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
We sort of foreshadow of the turn a little bit,
you know, you could kind of figure out on your own.
Because this is why we can't have nice things.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
So Ada his ideas were less about public service and
more about just saying, hey, moms are the hardest working
of all people. Let's at least to acknowledge that. And
she went on a one woman campaign. She was one
woman army, writing to everybody, sending telegrams, showing up at
(10:13):
the offices of public figures and saying, do you have
time to sit down for a second, you know, how's
your mom?
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Et cetera.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
And she spoke widely to groups large and small. She
paid for all of this. She didn't have a huge
support network at first. She made zines basically the the
early nineteen hundreds equivalent of zine's booklets about She was
a pamphleteer, right, a pamphleteer booklets about Mother's Day. She
(10:41):
herself had no children of her own.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
I think that's interesting. I mean, you know, that doesn't
really matter.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
I think she perhaps decided that she was going to
focus her energies into this kind of crusade, you know,
I mean, we don't have any information as to whether
there were any outs, you know, any I knew any
circumstances that led to her not having children, But it
sure seemed like whether that was the case or not,
she put that effort that would have gone into braising
(11:08):
children into this effort. I think that orialized her mother,
and to memorialize and honor mothers everywhere.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
I think that's one way to look at it.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I mean, even now in twenty twenty three, there's a bout,
there's a lot of very real, lazy prejudice against people
who for one reason or do not one reason or another,
do not have children. And it's it's pretty gross. It
was even worse back then, you know, when you're a woman,
and it just I mean, I just want to acknowledge
that because I'm sure very many ridiculous historians listening today
(11:39):
have experienced that prejudice. It's an ugly thing, and so
she probably was judged in her in her time.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, terms like old maid and stuff, you know what
I mean. Like it was, it was inherently there was
a bias against women that didn't have children, because the
assumption was that either they you know, couldn't and that
that othered them some way, or they were choosing not
to and we're therefore selfish in some way, shape or form.
And nowadays, of course, you know, women can have children
(12:09):
and also be professional and do all of the things
and push for these types of campaigns and also raise families.
This is very much part of, you know, the way
things have moved, and I think there's less of this
attitude around, but.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
It's still there.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
It's still very much I can tell you it's still
very much there. And you don't have to have children
to be a good person, No, And having children does
not inherently make you a good person.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Does But.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
We just wanted to acknowledge this. You know, Anna is
going is going through some rough stuff, but she perseveres.
May nineteen oh eight, she creates the first official Mother's Day,
or her version of Mother's Day, at a church in Grafton,
West Virginia, and then at a department store in Philadelphia.
(12:57):
Imagine how huge this is for the department store if
you think about it, they're the first people to get
in on the monetization of Mother's Day.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Wow, that might have been the beginning of the end.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Yeah, as far as the you know, more altruistic version
of Mother's Day was concerned.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
But it also makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
You know, department stores in those days were very much
a rallying place, you know, for the community to kind
of come together. You had your like soda fountains and
all of that stuff. And you know, it was really
just kind of a place where you would go to
be seen and to see other people in the community.
So it certainly made sense, but it unfortunately kind of
led to some negative consequences.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
One hundred percent. Yeah, and her campaign is successful, Politicians
and newspapers start picking it up. It's increasingly in the
zeitgeist of America. It all leads to nineteen fourteen when
President Woodrow Wilson calls Mother's Day a way to recognize
that tender genental lawMy the mothers of America.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
And also screw you Woodrow Wilson.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, also Woodrow Wilson, not the best, not the best.
Thank you Max with the facts of.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Phones and he drops in the knowledge.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Just for you.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
So good, there we go.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
No, let's put it in, yes, Max, Max with the
eternal beef against Woodrow Wilson, who was sort of a
human And we already are starting to see kind of
different philosophies on Mother's Day emerge. You know what is
what we we we we know the original intent with
Mother Jarvis was very quite literally to provide resources and
(14:44):
support for mothers who were bearing the brunt of you know,
raising the family while men were away with very little help,
with very little resources, often in dire poverty and difficult
situations involving you know, infant mortality and lack of healthcare.
So initially the whole idea was very much about providing
(15:05):
some of these things. It then kind of maybe became
a little bit more about just sort of like a
raising awareness for the amazing work that mothers do, the
gentle silent army of Windrow Wilson's quote there, or tender
gentle army rather, they're not silent necessarily. But then we
start to see it kind of that co opting that
we're talking about, really, you know, taking those philosophies and
(15:28):
kind of yeah, I don't know, grinding him into the
dirt a little bit.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Well capitalized on them, right, that's the worst part, right.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
I guess maybe being a little harsh, but sometimes when
you do capitalize on things, you sort of suck the goodness,
right right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Because and we'll get to some interesting facts and statistics
here at the end, but yeah, it starts in a
really good place. Both Jarvis's and Julia Howe are making
They're doing tremendous big things. By nineteen twelve, a lot
of other churches and towns and states are holding Mother's
(16:05):
Day celebrations of their own, and Anna Jarvis has established
the Mother's Day International Association. But almost immediately she gets
disillusioned because the holiday becomes all about swag. You buy
printed cards for your mom, You buy flowers. Hey, mom,
(16:27):
here's another gift, here's some candy. It becomes an expectation,
It becomes normalized that there must be these things bought
and sold as part of this. And Jarvis feels like
the holiday has gotten away from her. You know, she
feels like the lady who created the original Monopoly game.
(16:48):
She's like, why are these people taking my idea and
soullessly making money off it? So she starts campaigning against
Mother's Day profiteers.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
All the while, you know, candymakers, flores, greeting card companies
are looking and.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Saying, what, who us?
Speaker 3 (17:07):
We just want your mothers to have nice things, you
know that you buy from us exclusively.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
It's process. She sued everybody.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
She called them charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and other
termites that would undermine with their greed. One of the finest,
noblest and truest movements and celebrations. She's still coming out
of her own pocket for this too.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
She's so well and too great detriment to her personal wealth, right,
I mean she she did. You know that she did
have a quite a significant inheritance, and it dwindles significantly
because she was paying all these legal fees. So it
really does kind of show you how difficult it is
to fight city hall, you know, in these kinds of situations,
(17:56):
because it's a free market economy. Man, they're not doing
anything wrong. You can't prove that they co opted something exactly,
can you.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
I mean, it must be difficult.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
You can't tell people, like how do you tell people
that they can't like their mom on a specific day?
You know what I mean? Like, how do you legislate
against that?
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I mean?
Speaker 3 (18:17):
And I'm sure they're literally the argument that the lawyers
you know, for these companies were making, like like is
it wrong to give your sweet mother a box of sweeties,
you know.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And chocolate confections?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Is it wrong to watch your mother to have a
beautiful bouquet of flowers representing her vibrant spirits?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
You know? Like I could just picture the eye rolls.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
You know, I know, and we want to shout out
Sarah Pruitt over at history dot com why the founder
of Mother's Day turned against it. Look, Anna Jarvis went
super hard in the pain on this stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
She would conventions.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
In nineteen twenty five, there was this organization called the
American War Mothers and they used Mother's Day as a
fundraising opportunity, and they were selling carnations at this convention.
Anna Jarvis doesn't just crash the convention in Philly, she
gets arrested for raising a ruckus for disturbing the peace.
(19:23):
She also takes shots at first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for
using Mother's Day as a fundraising opportunity. She wants all
the smoke, basically.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So basically, but that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Though you put out an idea like that into the world,
it's gonna happen. And short of I don't know, arguing
for some sort of copyright infringement, which you can't really
do in this case because it's meant to be a
recognized holiday for all. So I don't really know what
(19:57):
leg she had to stand on here in terms of
her arm. It seems like at the end of the day,
she was kind of just shouting into the abyss.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Yeah, and she did have a copyright argument, right, that's
what she took to court. But it's very easy to
get around that stuff, you know, And so she's repeatedly
incredibly frustrated with this. By the nineteen forties, she is
more or less disowned the concept of the holiday altogether.
She is lobbying the government to see it remove from
(20:26):
the calendar, but no one's listening. Mother's Day is it's
a gold mine man, and businesses begin to count on
it in their balance sheets, so they're not going to
let it go.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Speaking of the copyright claim, didn't wasn't like the apostrophe
moved around a little bit in in an.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Effort to get around that. Yeah, this is interesting.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, yeah, she she claims copyright on the phrase second
Sunday in May Mother's Day mother mot a h R
apostrophe s And she's like a possessive, Right, I'm gonna
ensue anybody who uses this without my permission. So yeah,
like you said, people said, all right, that's fine, we'll
(21:13):
use the plural possessive, which is just moving the apostrophe.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah, day for all mothers as opposed to singular the
day that belongs to mother, right, tricksy tricksy stuff. But
but I mean I don't love it, but it is.
You can't own those words exactly right. Dungeons and dragons
would call it lawful evil. That's right, because I mean
(21:38):
her copyright existed on the phrase second Sunday in May
Mother's Day. If there's a rhyme there. She didn't necessarily
hold the legal, you know, per strings for the concept
of a day for mothers. You can't really do that.
That's like owning a baseball cap, you know, yeah, or
like the fidget spinner whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Right, And this is not to say that Anna didn't try.
You can find a Newsweek article from nineteen forty four
that claims she had thirty three separate pending lawsuits that year.
By this point in time, she has lived a long life.
(22:21):
She is eighty years old. She's got a lot of
health problems that come with old age. She's not doing
well financially because she spent so much of her inheritance
on these battles. She is in an assisted living space
in a sanatorium in Philly. And there were we found
(22:42):
a lot of rumors. I guess you could call them
our speculation that companies in the floral and card industries
secretly paid to take care of her. But if you
talk to historians like Kathleen and Dalini, then you see
no story and has been able to verify this. People
(23:05):
just kind of say, hey, be nice if that were true.
We don't have proof. It might just be a nice story.
But we do know that even at the end of
her life, she was still she was still fighting Mother's Day,
like on a door to door basis right.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
I hate that though, man, you know, I mean, it's
just because she did have such good intention. She was
carrying on this legacy of you know, her mother's work
before her, and spent her whole life just you know,
the rest of her life, the part of her life
that should have been her being taken care of, you know,
when when she spent all this time trying to take
care of other mothers. Instead she spent it under duress
(23:44):
and feeling as though her legacy had been like Sully,
this thing that she had worked so hard to create.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
And she passed away of heart failure in November of
nineteen forty eight, But Mother's Day continued, and Mother's Day
is not the creation of any single individual. Really, it's
the creation of multiple women. And the modern Mother's Day
is still yes, is it monetized, is it commodified? Of
(24:11):
course it is, But that doesn't necessarily make it bad.
It doesn't mean that you have to participate financially, you
know what I mean. There are I'm sure, I'm sure
there are thousands and thousands of moms listening right now
who are thinking, I don't know, I just want my
kid to call me, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Absolutely, yeah, call your mom, Call your mom, Call your mom,
because you just you never know when the last time
you're going to be able to speak to her.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
We'll be That's true, It's very true.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Well today, you know, Mother's Day it does exist.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
It is a calendar day.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Which day is it? I know we missed it by
a little bit here with Sunday, May fourteenth, And that's
always the day that it is. It's not like the
third Sunday of the mon there's something like that in
in in May.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
It's always the thirteen, always the second Sunday. It is
the same. Okay, So it's one of those second Sunday.
That's that.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
That's why I'm always confused because it's like there's no
hard date associated with it.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
That's always a weird one to me too. You know
what's another Thanksgiving?
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Yeah, thanksgivingest one, because calendars are a human invention and
they're therefore imperfect.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
But yes, you can also find Hey, it's not just
the US. You can also find other observances of Mother's
Day in places like Ethiopia. You can find it in Thailand,
where Mother's Day is celebrated in August on the birthday
of the Queen right and it's tied to the royal family.
(25:48):
You can find it all over the world because everybody
can agree despite all the differences that the human species has,
we're all big fans of moms in general, our own
mothers in particular. And Noel, I found that I've got
some silly statistics with Mother's Day, at least in the
(26:11):
United States. And I bet, I bet you've heard this one.
This is probably it's probably my favorite one. Forty percent
of adults will take their mom out to a restaurant
on Mother's Day, and for a long time it was
for a long time it was considered the busiest day
(26:31):
in the restaurant industry. Yeah, yeah, for sure, it's the
second busiest. Actually only Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Is a bigger one. Yeah, and Valentine's Day is a
whole story onto it.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
So in terms of the infiltration by greeting card companies
and you know, wine makers and what have you, you know,
chocolate tears, all of that stuff. It's also often used
as a day for launching political causes associated with feminism.
For example, in nineteen sixty eight, Corretta Scott King, of course,
(27:04):
the wife of Martin Luther King Junior, hosted a march
in support of underprivileged women and children on Mother's Day.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Which I think, you know what, we cannot speak for, uh,
cannot speak for Anna ourselves, but I like to think
she would be okay with that kind of that one. Yeah,
that would be okay because they're not selling T shirts
or anything. We know that it's such a big business.
This statistic blew me away. In twenty twenty one, just
(27:34):
that one year, American consumers spent an estimated twenty eight
point one billion dollars on Mother's Day and Mother's Day
stuff like what.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Kind of what kind of flowers are they buying? Are
they buying people? Are they getting their mom? Or cars? Yeah, unclear, unclear.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
You know what kind of flowers I've been buying lately, Ben,
what's that lego flower? Oh? The lego orkid is awesome, fantastic.
We have like the succulents. We have like some kind
of spring bouquets. They never die, they'll never let you down,
They'll never make you feel like a slacker for either
overwatering or underwatering. I'm still kind of trying to get
the hang of plants and keeping them alive. But you know,
(28:19):
there's still time.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I I have a bit of a green thumb. I
have had the same and they're called a money tree.
I've had the same one since I was an intern
at How Stuff Works. Nice old Ben Benn is still
kicking it, and I'm starting a green space at the
rooftop of my new place. You guys are definitely invited.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
I can't wait to check it out. I'm really excited.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
I'm actually about to get some landscaping work done in
my backyard with all native plants. I've been assured by
the folks who help me design it that they and
I won't have to do much to them because they're
gonna thrive already. Just like in this environment, so really
looking forward to that and also similarly would love to
have you all over for like a Fourth of July
barbecue situation. And didn't want to end on any kind
(29:04):
of down or note, but I just want to put
out a just a you know word to say I
miss my mother, who lost my mother a year ago,
roughly to the day, and first Mother's Day without my mom, Sandra.
So love you Sandra, and miss yet and happy Mother's Day.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
I'd like to say just a few brief words to
a lot of people. Mother's Day can be tough when
your mom has passed on, you know. Mother's Day can
be tough when you know your family is maybe at odds,
maybe you don't speak to your kids, maybe you and
(29:43):
your mom butt heads. Before my mother passed away also
quite recently, I was incredibly fortunate, and I like to
think that I knew that my mother was a very
very kind, beautiful woman. I don't think I ever really
(30:06):
had a fight with her, which is nuts. She just
she would just tell me she well, she was a
teacher for so many years, you know, like in your
mom was also teaching people, but.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
She was we fought all the time, so I'm jealous.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
I think she had just like because even though I'm
an only child, because I was essentially if your mom's
a teacher, you were one of twenty eight to thirty
two children's awesome year.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
But it's also like a beautiful thing to I mean, teaching,
as we've talked about many times on this shows, is
such a gift, you know, to be able to take
what you've learned and to pass that on to people
who can then use it to literally change their lives
or you know, guide the trajectory of their life. And
some of my mom's students, specifically singing my mom was
a singing teacher, have gone on to have great careers
(30:53):
in great opera houses and stuff, and wasn't the path
that I chose. But I'm just I'm very proud of
her and the way that she's change these people's lives.
And I'm sure that you see that with your mom's students,
and you feel the same way.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
And we guarantee you, fellow Ridiculous historians, your mom is
proud of you. Thanks of course, to our super producer,
mister Max Williams. Hey, thanks to missus Williams. Good job
on the kids. Thanks thanks to Alex Williams, I mean,
thanks to everybody. I think we're ending on a good
(31:26):
note here.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
I think so too. Yeah. No, and thanks to you Ben,
my brother from another mother, no question about it. Call
your mom please do. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the
(00:27):
show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in, and happy belated Mother's Day to all the
mothers out there. There's a super producer, Max.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Ben Noel, you.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Know, and you're my brother from another mother. Both of you,
the both of yous gonna lump you into that fun
alliterative rhyming phrase.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
We're also in typical ridiculous history fashion doing a show
about a holiday several days after it occurred.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
I take it back. A brother from another mother isn't
really a literative at all. It's just more of a
rhyming thing. It's got a nice internal rhyme, it rolls
off the tongue and has a good mouth feel, But
alliterative it is not. Ben, We're here again talking about
a holiday that was started with all great intention. Like
(01:22):
many holidays, you know, whether it be to honor a
deity of some sort, perhaps a member of the human species,
such as a mother or a father, and then you know, typically,
like the way of most holidays, we see the co
opting by interests, special interest groups aka corporations and people
(01:42):
that want to make money off of stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a very well intentioned event that the
best way to say it is the creator of Mother's
Day has a very complex relationship with Mother's Day.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, let's introduce Mother Jarvis. That's the street name for
Anne Reeves Jarvis. She is a homemaker in Appalachia. She
teaches Sunday school and Anne is born in eighteen thirty two.
She lives a long, full life. She is an activist.
(02:21):
She's a radical in her.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Way, like Ninja Turtles radical or like extreme. Well, I
guess that could be applied to the same.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
She's bodacious.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
She's bodacious. Yes, she hangs ten. But she's also a
cowabungo tour she's an activist.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
You're right.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
This is something in a post Civil war era that
she has decided that she wants to place some emphasis
on honoring the work of mothers, you know, while we
the men were away. You know, it's the same thing
like Rosie the Riveter and all that stuff, like the
idea of holding down the fort while the young men
are away fighting and potentially dying during the war.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So let's give mothers their due. Yeah, and let's also
educate them. Let's help them. Let's help mothers, especially impoverished
mothers in Appalachia. Let's help them be set up for success.
She was very concerned about the perilously high infant mortality rate.
There were very, very serious problems that predated the Civil War,
(03:23):
but they were exacerbated by that bloody conflict. She also
organized women's brigades. She encouraged women to help each other out,
regardless whether they were fighting for the Union or the Confederacy.
And then she start she proposed something called a Mother's
Friendship Day to promote peace between former Union and Confederate families.
(03:46):
Now that's a tall milkshake. There's a lot of blood
on the hands there, no.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Question, And just to not really walk back what I said,
but I mean, she did want to highlight, you know,
how important the work of mothers and women were during
this time. But to your point, Ben, it really was
much more of a functional, organizing kind of effort, wasn't
it like to provide resources to help you curtail some
(04:11):
of these shocking statistics.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, and we do want to note this is very important.
It's kind of like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Or
a story of royals. The person we're talking about, Mother Jarvis,
full name Anne Maria Reeves Jarvis. She is different. She's
a different person entirely from her daughter, Anna Marie Jarvis,
(04:34):
who will come up later. So Anne is the mom
and Anna is the daughter. We've got to introduce a
third person here, a second woman that was very influential
in the founding and Mother's day.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Julia Ward Howe a poet and she knew it. Also
a reformer. During the Civil War, she was an active
volunteer in the very important and new US Sanitary Commission.
This was in order to provide sterilization hygienic environments in hospitals,
(05:08):
to make sure that folks who were sick and wounded
from injuries and war conditions were taken care of properly,
and that going into a hospital wasn't in and of itself,
a death sentence. If you go into a hospital with
a severe wound or illness and it's not been cleaned
or it's not been you know, sterilized, you could emerge
(05:32):
from that hospital worse than you came in, or not
emerge at all.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah, it can get infected, You can intercepsist all kinds
of nasty things can happen. In eighteen sixty one, Julia
Ward Howe also writes the famous Civil War anthem, the
Battle Hymn of the Republic, and was talking briefly, who
was I think it was our how Robert Evans on Twitter,
(05:58):
old friend of the show.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
He just you guys wild.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
He was on Twitter, and I think he must have
just overheard this song because he all he posted, without
much of an explanation, was the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Has no right to slap this hard.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, it kind of a banker. And she wrote it.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
It gets published February of eighteen sixty two, and then
she does another predecessor of Mother's Day In eighteen seventy,
Julia Ward Howe says, we need a Mother's.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Day for peace.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
It's just celebrating the idea of peace, celebrating the idea
that there could be a future without.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
War totally and let's just be you know, of course,
mothers are the source of all life, of human life.
This is an obvious, no brainer statement, but one that
I think often gets overlooked. So it makes sense to
kind of feature the idea of the mother, you know,
as a central kind of force of creation as opposed
(06:57):
to death and destruction, of a counter to some of
the horrifying conditions of war. So she kind of put out,
I guess, sort of a not really a manifesto, more
of a declaration, a proclamation literally, called the Mother's Day
Proclamation in eighteen seventy. She felt that mothers had the
(07:19):
power to prevent war, you know, just through their actions
and through the way they raised their children and sort
of the ideals that they instill into their into their offspring.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, like when jay Z's mom told him to not
talk trash about nas so much. Moms can stop stuff.
Moms exercise a great power over the world, and it's
it's a noble thing for Julia Ward how to recognize
right and to leverage and her version of Mother's Day
(07:53):
was actually stuck around in a bunch of cities, in
Boston in particular, for three decades, but in the years
leading up to World War One it kind of petered out,
and there it stayed until nineteen oh seven. From right
before World War One till around nineteen oh seven, there
(08:15):
wasn't really a Mother's Day. People just hopefully people were
just nice to their moms every.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Day, one would hope and enter our tertiary hero here,
I guess the aforementioned Anna M. Jarvis of Philadelphia, the
daughter of Mother Jarvis, the og Mother's Day banner bearer.
I guess you could call a standard bearer, right, Anna M. Jarvis.
(08:42):
After her mother had passed in nineteen o six, Jarvis
the younger, she decided to memorialize her mother's life and
works by campaigning for a national recognition of a Mother's
Day of a sort. She said that she hoped and
(09:03):
prayed that someone sometime will found a memorial Mother's Day
commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity
in every field of life because, and Jarvis said, she
is entitled to it.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Yeah, and we're getting we're getting a lot of this
from the Forgotten History of Mother's Day by Heidi stone Hill.
And there are a couple other sources we don't want
to shout out quite yet because they might spoil the turn.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
There was a turn here. There's always a turn.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
We sort of foreshadow of the turn a little bit,
you know, you could kind of figure out on your own.
Because this is why we can't have nice things.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
So Ada his ideas were less about public service and
more about just saying, hey, moms are the hardest working
of all people. Let's at least to acknowledge that. And
she went on a one woman campaign. She was one
woman army, writing to everybody, sending telegrams, showing up at
(10:13):
the offices of public figures and saying, do you have
time to sit down for a second, you know, how's
your mom?
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Et cetera.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
And she spoke widely to groups large and small. She
paid for all of this. She didn't have a huge
support network at first. She made zines basically the the
early nineteen hundreds equivalent of zine's booklets about She was
a pamphleteer, right, a pamphleteer booklets about Mother's Day. She
(10:41):
herself had no children of her own.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
I think that's interesting. I mean, you know, that doesn't
really matter.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
I think she perhaps decided that she was going to
focus her energies into this kind of crusade, you know,
I mean, we don't have any information as to whether
there were any outs, you know, any I knew any
circumstances that led to her not having children, But it
sure seemed like whether that was the case or not,
she put that effort that would have gone into braising
(11:08):
children into this effort. I think that orialized her mother,
and to memorialize and honor mothers everywhere.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
I think that's one way to look at it.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I mean, even now in twenty twenty three, there's a bout,
there's a lot of very real, lazy prejudice against people
who for one reason or do not one reason or another,
do not have children. And it's it's pretty gross. It
was even worse back then, you know, when you're a woman,
and it just I mean, I just want to acknowledge
that because I'm sure very many ridiculous historians listening today
(11:39):
have experienced that prejudice. It's an ugly thing, and so
she probably was judged in her in her time.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, terms like old maid and stuff, you know what
I mean. Like it was, it was inherently there was
a bias against women that didn't have children, because the
assumption was that either they you know, couldn't and that
that othered them some way, or they were choosing not
to and we're therefore selfish in some way, shape or form.
And nowadays, of course, you know, women can have children
(12:09):
and also be professional and do all of the things
and push for these types of campaigns and also raise families.
This is very much part of, you know, the way
things have moved, and I think there's less of this
attitude around, but.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
It's still there.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
It's still very much I can tell you it's still
very much there. And you don't have to have children
to be a good person, No, And having children does
not inherently make you a good person.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Does But.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
We just wanted to acknowledge this. You know, Anna is
going is going through some rough stuff, but she perseveres.
May nineteen oh eight, she creates the first official Mother's Day,
or her version of Mother's Day, at a church in Grafton,
West Virginia, and then at a department store in Philadelphia.
(12:57):
Imagine how huge this is for the department store if
you think about it, they're the first people to get
in on the monetization of Mother's Day.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Wow, that might have been the beginning of the end.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Yeah, as far as the you know, more altruistic version
of Mother's Day was concerned.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
But it also makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
You know, department stores in those days were very much
a rallying place, you know, for the community to kind
of come together. You had your like soda fountains and
all of that stuff. And you know, it was really
just kind of a place where you would go to
be seen and to see other people in the community.
So it certainly made sense, but it unfortunately kind of
led to some negative consequences.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
One hundred percent. Yeah, and her campaign is successful, Politicians
and newspapers start picking it up. It's increasingly in the
zeitgeist of America. It all leads to nineteen fourteen when
President Woodrow Wilson calls Mother's Day a way to recognize
that tender genental lawMy the mothers of America.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
And also screw you Woodrow Wilson.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, also Woodrow Wilson, not the best, not the best.
Thank you Max with the facts of.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Phones and he drops in the knowledge.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Just for you.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
So good, there we go.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
No, let's put it in, yes, Max, Max with the
eternal beef against Woodrow Wilson, who was sort of a
human And we already are starting to see kind of
different philosophies on Mother's Day emerge. You know what is
what we we we we know the original intent with
Mother Jarvis was very quite literally to provide resources and
(14:44):
support for mothers who were bearing the brunt of you know,
raising the family while men were away with very little help,
with very little resources, often in dire poverty and difficult
situations involving you know, infant mortality and lack of healthcare.
So initially the whole idea was very much about providing
(15:05):
some of these things. It then kind of maybe became
a little bit more about just sort of like a
raising awareness for the amazing work that mothers do, the
gentle silent army of Windrow Wilson's quote there, or tender
gentle army rather, they're not silent necessarily. But then we
start to see it kind of that co opting that
we're talking about, really, you know, taking those philosophies and
(15:28):
kind of yeah, I don't know, grinding him into the
dirt a little bit.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Well capitalized on them, right, that's the worst part, right.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
I guess maybe being a little harsh, but sometimes when
you do capitalize on things, you sort of suck the goodness,
right right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Because and we'll get to some interesting facts and statistics
here at the end, but yeah, it starts in a
really good place. Both Jarvis's and Julia Howe are making
They're doing tremendous big things. By nineteen twelve, a lot
of other churches and towns and states are holding Mother's
(16:05):
Day celebrations of their own, and Anna Jarvis has established
the Mother's Day International Association. But almost immediately she gets
disillusioned because the holiday becomes all about swag. You buy
printed cards for your mom, You buy flowers. Hey, mom,
(16:27):
here's another gift, here's some candy. It becomes an expectation,
It becomes normalized that there must be these things bought
and sold as part of this. And Jarvis feels like
the holiday has gotten away from her. You know, she
feels like the lady who created the original Monopoly game.
(16:48):
She's like, why are these people taking my idea and
soullessly making money off it? So she starts campaigning against
Mother's Day profiteers.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
All the while, you know, candymakers, flores, greeting card companies
are looking and.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Saying, what, who us?
Speaker 3 (17:07):
We just want your mothers to have nice things, you
know that you buy from us exclusively.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
It's process. She sued everybody.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
She called them charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and other
termites that would undermine with their greed. One of the finest,
noblest and truest movements and celebrations. She's still coming out
of her own pocket for this too.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
She's so well and too great detriment to her personal wealth, right,
I mean she she did. You know that she did
have a quite a significant inheritance, and it dwindles significantly
because she was paying all these legal fees. So it
really does kind of show you how difficult it is
to fight city hall, you know, in these kinds of situations,
(17:56):
because it's a free market economy. Man, they're not doing
anything wrong. You can't prove that they co opted something exactly,
can you.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
I mean, it must be difficult.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
You can't tell people, like how do you tell people
that they can't like their mom on a specific day?
You know what I mean? Like, how do you legislate
against that?
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I mean?
Speaker 3 (18:17):
And I'm sure they're literally the argument that the lawyers
you know, for these companies were making, like like is
it wrong to give your sweet mother a box of sweeties,
you know.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And chocolate confections?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Is it wrong to watch your mother to have a
beautiful bouquet of flowers representing her vibrant spirits?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
You know? Like I could just picture the eye rolls.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
You know, I know, and we want to shout out
Sarah Pruitt over at history dot com why the founder
of Mother's Day turned against it. Look, Anna Jarvis went
super hard in the pain on this stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
She would conventions.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
In nineteen twenty five, there was this organization called the
American War Mothers and they used Mother's Day as a
fundraising opportunity, and they were selling carnations at this convention.
Anna Jarvis doesn't just crash the convention in Philly, she
gets arrested for raising a ruckus for disturbing the peace.
(19:23):
She also takes shots at first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for
using Mother's Day as a fundraising opportunity. She wants all
the smoke, basically.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So basically, but that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
Though you put out an idea like that into the world,
it's gonna happen. And short of I don't know, arguing
for some sort of copyright infringement, which you can't really
do in this case because it's meant to be a
recognized holiday for all. So I don't really know what
(19:57):
leg she had to stand on here in terms of
her arm. It seems like at the end of the day,
she was kind of just shouting into the abyss.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Yeah, and she did have a copyright argument, right, that's
what she took to court. But it's very easy to
get around that stuff, you know, And so she's repeatedly
incredibly frustrated with this. By the nineteen forties, she is
more or less disowned the concept of the holiday altogether.
She is lobbying the government to see it remove from
(20:26):
the calendar, but no one's listening. Mother's Day is it's
a gold mine man, and businesses begin to count on
it in their balance sheets, so they're not going to
let it go.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Speaking of the copyright claim, didn't wasn't like the apostrophe
moved around a little bit in in an.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Effort to get around that. Yeah, this is interesting.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, yeah, she she claims copyright on the phrase second
Sunday in May Mother's Day mother mot a h R
apostrophe s And she's like a possessive, Right, I'm gonna
ensue anybody who uses this without my permission. So yeah,
like you said, people said, all right, that's fine, we'll
(21:13):
use the plural possessive, which is just moving the apostrophe.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah, day for all mothers as opposed to singular the
day that belongs to mother, right, tricksy tricksy stuff. But
but I mean I don't love it, but it is.
You can't own those words exactly right. Dungeons and dragons
would call it lawful evil. That's right, because I mean
(21:38):
her copyright existed on the phrase second Sunday in May
Mother's Day. If there's a rhyme there. She didn't necessarily
hold the legal, you know, per strings for the concept
of a day for mothers. You can't really do that.
That's like owning a baseball cap, you know, yeah, or
like the fidget spinner whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Right, And this is not to say that Anna didn't try.
You can find a Newsweek article from nineteen forty four
that claims she had thirty three separate pending lawsuits that year.
By this point in time, she has lived a long life.
(22:21):
She is eighty years old. She's got a lot of
health problems that come with old age. She's not doing
well financially because she spent so much of her inheritance
on these battles. She is in an assisted living space
in a sanatorium in Philly. And there were we found
(22:42):
a lot of rumors. I guess you could call them
our speculation that companies in the floral and card industries
secretly paid to take care of her. But if you
talk to historians like Kathleen and Dalini, then you see
no story and has been able to verify this. People
(23:05):
just kind of say, hey, be nice if that were true.
We don't have proof. It might just be a nice story.
But we do know that even at the end of
her life, she was still she was still fighting Mother's Day,
like on a door to door basis right.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
I hate that though, man, you know, I mean, it's
just because she did have such good intention. She was
carrying on this legacy of you know, her mother's work
before her, and spent her whole life just you know,
the rest of her life, the part of her life
that should have been her being taken care of, you know,
when when she spent all this time trying to take
care of other mothers. Instead she spent it under duress
(23:44):
and feeling as though her legacy had been like Sully,
this thing that she had worked so hard to create.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
And she passed away of heart failure in November of
nineteen forty eight, But Mother's Day continued, and Mother's Day
is not the creation of any single individual. Really, it's
the creation of multiple women. And the modern Mother's Day
is still yes, is it monetized, is it commodified? Of
(24:11):
course it is, But that doesn't necessarily make it bad.
It doesn't mean that you have to participate financially, you
know what I mean. There are I'm sure, I'm sure
there are thousands and thousands of moms listening right now
who are thinking, I don't know, I just want my
kid to call me, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Absolutely, yeah, call your mom, Call your mom, Call your mom,
because you just you never know when the last time
you're going to be able to speak to her.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
We'll be That's true, It's very true.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Well today, you know, Mother's Day it does exist.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
It is a calendar day.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Which day is it? I know we missed it by
a little bit here with Sunday, May fourteenth, And that's
always the day that it is. It's not like the
third Sunday of the mon there's something like that in
in in May.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
It's always the thirteen, always the second Sunday. It is
the same. Okay, So it's one of those second Sunday.
That's that.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
That's why I'm always confused because it's like there's no
hard date associated with it.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
That's always a weird one to me too. You know
what's another Thanksgiving?
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Yeah, thanksgivingest one, because calendars are a human invention and
they're therefore imperfect.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
But yes, you can also find Hey, it's not just
the US. You can also find other observances of Mother's
Day in places like Ethiopia. You can find it in Thailand,
where Mother's Day is celebrated in August on the birthday
of the Queen right and it's tied to the royal family.
(25:48):
You can find it all over the world because everybody
can agree despite all the differences that the human species has,
we're all big fans of moms in general, our own
mothers in particular. And Noel, I found that I've got
some silly statistics with Mother's Day, at least in the
(26:11):
United States. And I bet, I bet you've heard this one.
This is probably it's probably my favorite one. Forty percent
of adults will take their mom out to a restaurant
on Mother's Day, and for a long time it was
for a long time it was considered the busiest day
(26:31):
in the restaurant industry. Yeah, yeah, for sure, it's the
second busiest. Actually only Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Is a bigger one. Yeah, and Valentine's Day is a
whole story onto it.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
So in terms of the infiltration by greeting card companies
and you know, wine makers and what have you, you know,
chocolate tears, all of that stuff. It's also often used
as a day for launching political causes associated with feminism.
For example, in nineteen sixty eight, Corretta Scott King, of course,
(27:04):
the wife of Martin Luther King Junior, hosted a march
in support of underprivileged women and children on Mother's Day.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Which I think, you know what, we cannot speak for, uh,
cannot speak for Anna ourselves, but I like to think
she would be okay with that kind of that one. Yeah,
that would be okay because they're not selling T shirts
or anything. We know that it's such a big business.
This statistic blew me away. In twenty twenty one, just
(27:34):
that one year, American consumers spent an estimated twenty eight
point one billion dollars on Mother's Day and Mother's Day
stuff like what.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Kind of what kind of flowers are they buying? Are
they buying people? Are they getting their mom? Or cars? Yeah, unclear, unclear.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
You know what kind of flowers I've been buying lately, Ben,
what's that lego flower? Oh? The lego orkid is awesome, fantastic.
We have like the succulents. We have like some kind
of spring bouquets. They never die, they'll never let you down,
They'll never make you feel like a slacker for either
overwatering or underwatering. I'm still kind of trying to get
the hang of plants and keeping them alive. But you know,
(28:19):
there's still time.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I I have a bit of a green thumb. I
have had the same and they're called a money tree.
I've had the same one since I was an intern
at How Stuff Works. Nice old Ben Benn is still
kicking it, and I'm starting a green space at the
rooftop of my new place. You guys are definitely invited.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
I can't wait to check it out. I'm really excited.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
I'm actually about to get some landscaping work done in
my backyard with all native plants. I've been assured by
the folks who help me design it that they and
I won't have to do much to them because they're
gonna thrive already. Just like in this environment, so really
looking forward to that and also similarly would love to
have you all over for like a Fourth of July
barbecue situation. And didn't want to end on any kind
(29:04):
of down or note, but I just want to put
out a just a you know word to say I
miss my mother, who lost my mother a year ago,
roughly to the day, and first Mother's Day without my mom, Sandra.
So love you Sandra, and miss yet and happy Mother's Day.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
I'd like to say just a few brief words to
a lot of people. Mother's Day can be tough when
your mom has passed on, you know. Mother's Day can
be tough when you know your family is maybe at odds,
maybe you don't speak to your kids, maybe you and
(29:43):
your mom butt heads. Before my mother passed away also
quite recently, I was incredibly fortunate, and I like to
think that I knew that my mother was a very
very kind, beautiful woman. I don't think I ever really
(30:06):
had a fight with her, which is nuts. She just
she would just tell me she well, she was a
teacher for so many years, you know, like in your
mom was also teaching people, but.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
She was we fought all the time, so I'm jealous.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
I think she had just like because even though I'm
an only child, because I was essentially if your mom's
a teacher, you were one of twenty eight to thirty
two children's awesome year.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
But it's also like a beautiful thing to I mean, teaching,
as we've talked about many times on this shows, is
such a gift, you know, to be able to take
what you've learned and to pass that on to people
who can then use it to literally change their lives
or you know, guide the trajectory of their life. And
some of my mom's students, specifically singing my mom was
a singing teacher, have gone on to have great careers
(30:53):
in great opera houses and stuff, and wasn't the path
that I chose. But I'm just I'm very proud of
her and the way that she's change these people's lives.
And I'm sure that you see that with your mom's students,
and you feel the same way.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
And we guarantee you, fellow Ridiculous historians, your mom is
proud of you. Thanks of course, to our super producer,
mister Max Williams. Hey, thanks to missus Williams. Good job
on the kids. Thanks thanks to Alex Williams, I mean,
thanks to everybody. I think we're ending on a good
(31:26):
note here.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
I think so too. Yeah. No, and thanks to you Ben,
my brother from another mother, no question about it. Call
your mom please do. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Noel Brown
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