It’s scary to imagine a world without moms. There would be no clean clothes, no good food and messy houses.

Children would be eating with dirty hands, and no one would have matching socks.

Honoring mothers is an ancient tradition, which can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

An early Christian festival is known as “Mothering Sunday,” was held in the 1600’s, was an early precursor to our present Mother’s Day. This yearly festival was simply a special church service where people returned to their “mother church” where they were baptized. It was said that those who did this, have gone “a-mothering.”

As part of the celebration, children would pick flowers on their way to church and give them to their mothers. Later on, mothers also received presents and flowers.

Sadly, this tradition eventually died.

However, Woodrow Wilson in a Presidential Proclamation officially resurrected “Mothers Day” in 1914 as a result of the work of Anna Jarvis.

Anna started the Mothers Day campaign in 1905, the year her mother Ann Jarvis died. Her mother was a peace activist in the War Between the States. She started the Mothers Day Work Clubs.

Anna wanted to honor her mother by continuing the work she started and honor all mothers. She believed that a mother was “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”

After all, who would willingly sign up for a job that lasts a lifetime, with no pay, no breaks, and includes, training, cooking, cleaning and worrying about where their kids are late at night.

This job has first, second and third shift work and little rest for at least the first 20 years. The job description for mothers, or “Domestic Engineers,” has not changed much in the past 200 years or more.

Instead of cooking over the electric or gas stove, mother had to cook over a fireplace, complete with hanging cast iron pots over the hot fire.

In later years, she just had to keep the fire burning in the wood stove.

Mothers today just throw the clothes in a washing machine. Back in the old days, the clothes went in a cast iron wash pot over a fire to heat the water, were stirred with a wood stick, transfered to other large cast iron pots with clean water, then wrung out by hand.

She made her own lye soap to wash the clothes, dishes and bathe.

No dryer worked better than the sun and clothes dried on the lines had fresh scents.

Disciplining was the norm.

My Grandma Frick chose her own peach tree branch as a disciplinary tool. It must have worked. She turned to be a good mother, wife and citizen.

Her spankings didn’t seem to hurt her “psyche” in any way.

Doing laundry, ironing, sewing, mending, making clothes, cleaning, cooking, raising and teaching children, getting water from the well and starting fires to cook, was just an average day in the life of a mother in the good old days.

Granted, the children helped and it was the mother’s responsibility to teach these skills to them. But moms had to supervise them.

That alone is a full-time job. Gardening, planting, hoeing, picking the vegetables, preserving the fruit, veggies, and meat and tending to chickens and other livestock were also in the job description. Mothers did these chores while pregnant, or nursing, and while watching toddlers.

I tire just thinking about this. I can’t imagine how tired they were at night.

Mothers today work as hard and are just as tired, but the pay hasn’t improved.

We mothers serve because we love our kids. Them helping with the housework every week is a good place to start showing their gratitude!

Happy Mothers day.