Happy Mother’s Day. Just a Hallmark Holiday? Nope. Although I recommend that you call your mother, cook breakfast, send flowers and tell mom you love her. I surprised my congregation this week when I said that Mother’s Day started as a peace holiday.

A precursor to Mother’s Day came from the abolitionist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe. In 1870 Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” a call to action that asked mothers to unite in promoting world peace. In 1873 Howe campaigned for a “Mother’s Peace Day” to be celebrated every June 2. Her poem, a Mother’s Day Proclamation, exhorted women to take control and to not sacrifice another son to war:

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

What we know as Mother’s Day, even the trademarked spelling was first created and celebrated by Anna Jarvis as a memorial to her own mother, a peace activist. Anna Jarvis went on to decry the commercialization of Mother’s Day.

I won’t lie. I like the trappings. The idea that one day a year I as a mother am feted. I like the recognition of the fact that I am a good parent. And I try to be. I really do. To my daughter, Sarah, and my three step children–Anna, Richard and Gabrielle.

Am I perfect? No. Certainly not. I have been known to lose patience and yell at my kids. I even once hit Sarah when she was stalling getting ready for school.

Was my mother perfect. Absolutely not. She was busy with her own life. She thought that if she told us she was proud of us it would go to our heads. She actually asked that very question. On the way to my brother’s wedding where she knew she was making a toast, she asked, “So I am not supposed to say I am proud of you guys? Because I am.” I spent a lot of time trying to earn that sense of pride. I still am.

But it was my mother who taught me a love of social justice. Through her understanding of Judaism as an ethical religion, as prophetic Judaism and her love of Girl Scouting and leaving the place better than you found it, we knew we had to work for social change.

So on this Mother’s Day, I will enjoy my favorite foods, fresh squeezed orange juice and Starbucks coffee, a good steak. I will take photos of tulips. And I will pause. To help make the world a better place, a more peaceful world. And I will smile, as I remember my mother.