Ventura Breeze
Apr. 22, 2009

By Rebecca Wicks

We all know moms matter. I mean hey, dads, sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts matter too – but, there is something special about the role moms tend to play in our lives, especially in our childhood.

For many of us being a mom is arguably better than having a mom ourselves.

For me, there is something incredibly satisfying about being a mom. Before I was a mom I was a completely different person. I was a “time is money” gal. I worked and travelled a lot. My shoe wardrobe – and yes, it was a wardrobe unto itself – consisted of no less than 25 different pairs of heels alone.

Today, I am a penny-pinching, Target-shopping, spit-up-wearing mom.

And, I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

Now each of us is different and different things make each of us happy. I’m just one of those people who never thought that being a stay-at-home-mom was for me.

So where did this holiday come from? Some claim the day emerged from a custom of mother worship in ancient Greece. According to MothersDayCentral.com the earliest historical records of society celebrating a mother deity can be found among the ancient Egyptians, who held an annual festival to honor the goddess Isis.

The first North American Mother’s Day was conceptualized by Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870. Famous for penning the Battle of the Republic, legend has it Howe was distraught by the death and carnage of the Civil War and called on mothers to come together and protest what she saw as the futility of their sons killing the sons of other mothers. With her proclamation she called for an international Mother’s Day celebrating peace and motherhood.

Howe footed the bill for a number of celebrations, but the holiday fizzled when her funding stopped. Decades later Anna M. Jarvis petitioned the superintendent of the church where her late mother had spent teaching Sunday school. Her request was honored and on May 10, 1908 the first official Mother’s Day celebration took place at Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia and in a church in Philadelphia.

However it started, for many, motherhood is about laughter and laughing.

Recently on a local online Ventura mom’s message board members piped in completing the sentence, “You know you’re a mom when…”

I’ll leave you with some of my personal favorites:

1.  …it takes you until three in the afternoon to realize you put your underwear on inside out.
2.  …spit up is the only “perfume” you wear.
3.  …you eat food that your kid spit out.
4.  …you start sounding like your own mother.
5.  …going grocery shopping by yourself is actually fun!
6.  …you will catch puke or poo with your bare hands if you have to, or wipe a snotty nose with your fingers and it feels completely natural.
7.  …you make sure your child has plenty of fruits and veggies while you shove your face with as much chocolate and other crap as possible when he goes to sleep.
8.  …you spend more on your kids shoes and clothes than your own.