Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (25 page)

After her mother died on May 9, 1905, Anna began serious work to answer Ann Maria’s prayer. Being the daughter of a dedicated activist, she knew how to get things done. By the second anniversary of her mother’s death Anna had convinced the minister of Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, to hold a Mother’s Day memorial service. Anna passed out white carnations, her mother’s favorite flower—an act that would later come back to haunt her. Eventually those whose mothers had died wore white carnations, while those whose mothers were living wore pink or red carnations.

Anna kept on fighting to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. With the help of some wealthy supporters, her efforts began to pay off by the third anniversary of her mother’s death. By May 10, 1908, the Mother’s Day Sunday service in Philadelphia brought out a crowd of more than 15,000! The idea really took off in the following year, and by 1909 forty-five states, plus the territories, Canada, and Mexico, observed the holiday.

Congress finally woke up and smelled the flowers. They voted in 1913 to have government officials from the president on down wear carnations on Mother’s Day. By 1914, Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it an official holiday.

Anna wanted Mother’s Day “to brighten the lives of good mothers. To have them know we (their children) appreciate them, though we do not show it as often as we ought.” What Anna didn’t appreciate were the commercial interests that looked at moms and began to see dollar signs. She opposed the sale of Mother’s Day cards, “A printed card . . . means nothing except you’re too lazy to write.” She opposed candy sales too, since she thought that adult children brought a box of candy to mother, then ate most of it themselves! But it was the florists who made her blood boil. They had turned Mother’s Day into a day to purchase flowers. “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit,” Anna said.

She tried urging practical gifts like new eyeglasses or comfortable shoes. When that failed, she worked to get rid of the darned day altogether. But this time, letters and lob-bying
didn’t work. In 1923, her lawsuits to stop Mother’s Day celebrations in New York failed and her protests even landed her in jail. In the 1930s, perhaps a little unbalanced from the long battle, Anna was removed by police after she disrupted a sale of carnations . . . by the American War Mothers.

Despite Anna’s best efforts, she could not undo her work, nor the work of greeting card manufacturers. Mother’s Day lived on and thrived. Nations across the globe now formally honor mothers with their own special day. But we wonder, in answering her mother’s prayer, did Anna create a monster? We don’t think so. Even though commercialism can run amok, the sentiment of the holiday does shine through. Grateful women fondly remembered Anna as the mother of Mother’s Day and sent her cards for years. Oh, the irony.

Binti Jua shows some maternal moxie!

M
om saves a little boy from ferocious gorillas! Showing a calm intelligence when everyone around her had panicked, a brave mother (with her own baby still clinging to her) saved a three-year-old toddler who’d fallen approximately 20 feet to the floor of the gorilla enclosure at Illinois’s Brookfield Zoo. The catch? The heroic mom was one of the gorillas.

On August 16, 1996, at the Brookfield Zoo’s Primate World exhibit, a rambunctious toddler climbed the stone-and-bamboo barrier and then fell to the floor of the gorilla compound. The horrified crowd panicked and the boy’s mother screamed, “The gorilla’s got my baby!” A female gorilla, Binti-Jua (whose name means “Daughter of Sunshine” in Swahili) was the first to act. Carrying her own baby, Koola, on her back, she approached the unconscious boy and picked him up.

Gorillas are five and a half feet tall when they stand straight up on their hind legs and can weigh from 200 to 600 pounds. Their fierce reputation is undeserved, but even the zookeepers who were familiar with the gentleness of giant apes were worried. The helpless child was suddenly under the control of a wild animal.

Binti-Jua cradled the child in her arms and rocked him gently. She seemed to hesitate as to where best to take the little boy; then, keeping other gorillas away, she crossed the compound and placed him near the door where the zookeepers usually entered. She placed the child gently down in a place where waiting staff and paramedics could easily take over. Then, as a stunned crowd watched, the rescuer casually returned to her comfortable spot and began to groom her own baby. The little boy spent a few days in the hospital and was released as good as new.

Binti-Jua’s actions hit the headlines. Celebrated for her amazing rescue, she also became the focus of controversy. Dr. Morris Goodman, a molecular phylogeneticist and the man who discovered the small genetic differences in the coding between human and gorilla DNA, believed that Binti-Jua had some sort of thought process similar to a human’s regarding the safety of the child. She had recognized the toddler as vulnerable and displayed intelligent behavior by moving him to safety. Others praised her ability to cope intelligently in a new and unexpected situation.

Skeptics argued that Binti-Jua was only trying to win the approval of her keepers and avoid punishment by retrieving something for them. They pointed out that Binti had been reared by humans, and when she became pregnant, the zoo staff gave her mothering lessons. This led some researchers to argue that Binti-Jua acted more like a human mom because she’d been raised and learned parenting skills from human keepers.

Witnesses, however, claimed that regardless of what did or did not go on in her brain, Binti treated the boy with as much gentleness and care as if she’d been his own mother. And as the rescued toddler recovered from his injuries, Binti was praised as a genuine heroine. Letters and gifts (including pounds of bananas) poured in from all over the world. The heroine received a medal from the American Legion, an honorary membership in a Downey, California, PTA, and a spot as one of the 25 most intriguing “people” in
People
magazine.

From an overworked peasant wife to the mother of a god-king and the heroine of a country in exile, Diki Tsering rose to the challenges of an amazing life.

W
hat if you were a religious, hard-toiling peasant mother who suddenly learned that your two-year-old toddler was the incarnation of a god? Not only that, but he was preordained to become the leader of a nation? It’s an event that seems impossible, almost beyond imagining, but it was exactly what happened to Diki Tsering, the mother of Tibet’s Dalai Lama.

Born in the year of the ox, her grandfather gave her the name Sonam Tsomo, after the goddess of fertility and longevity. Sonam was a peasant girl from the northeastern edge of Tibet. Though she had many chores and was never formally educated, she was quite happy growing up on her parents’ large farm. She wanted to stay there, close to her family, but Tibetan customs were rigid—a daughter must marry and serve her husband’s family in his household. At the age of 16, Sonam left home a reluctant bride.

Her new in-laws wanted a daughter-in-law to help them in their old age. The 16-year-old was put to work at home and in the fields. Like Cinderella, Sonam was expected to
be on the job 24–7. She fetched water, swept the floors, fed and milked the animals, collected fuel for the fires, made the meals, and tended crops. Despite the harshness, the bride accepted her life, believing as a devout Buddhist that suffering would ennoble her character and make her a better human being.

A few years after her marriage, Sonam’s in-laws died. She helped her husband manage the farm and she was also responsible for running the household as well as caring for her children. But some things didn’t change: she was still working ‘round the clock, and when she had a child she simply tied the baby on her back and returned to her chores. In fact, Sonam was hard at work shoveling snow when she had an important visit from government officials. They told her that, like Cinderella, her drudgery was over and that she would live in a palace; she’d even have a new name, Diki Tsering, which means “ocean of luck.” The enormous change in this mother’s life was all because of her two-year-old toddler, Llhamo Dhondup.

The strangers, who arrived at Diki Tsering’s door in 1937, had been led there by dreams, divination, and oracles. They were an official search party scouring the country for the reincarnation of the late thirteenth Dalai Lama. The title “Dalai Lama” means “teacher of wisdom as vast as the ocean,” and he’s considered a god-king, Avalo-kitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, spiritual and political leader of Tibet. Each new Dalai Lama is believed to be a reincarnation of the previous one. When little Llhamo Dhondup passed the search party’s official tests (like being able to identify possessions of the thirteenth
Dalai Lama), the toddler was recognized as the fourteenth Dalai Lama. And his mom became Amala, the great mother of the nation.