[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 58 (Friday, May 12, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Page S4520]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              MOTHER'S DAY

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, one last item, a very important statement, 
and then we will close down. But it is very important and people will 
recognize why.
  This Sunday, millions of families around the world will celebrate 
their moms. I was changing my reservations around. I know a lot of 
people are scurrying around for reservations. I should be cooking at 
home that day, I guess, but I am looking for an appropriate place for 
reservations, shifting it from Sunday afternoon to Sunday evening.
  Restaurants will be packed on Sunday. Living rooms will be packed 
full, crammed full of aunts and uncles and fidgety children.
  Families will warmly ``remember when'' to show their moms they love 
them. I have three boys, and they let me know all the time how much 
they love their mom. But I don't know where all three boys are going to 
be. They are going to be traveling all over the country today, so I am 
trying to get them together as well--all the challenges of Mother's 
Day.
  Mother's Day, as we all know, is the busiest long distance calling 
day of the year. It accounts for more than one-fifth of all the floral 
purchases made for the holidays that 1 day.
  We typically start the day by going to church and then gathering 
either in the afternoon or the evening--a tradition that millions and 
millions and millions of people will celebrate and have celebrated over 
the years.
  The celebrations of our moms have gone back millennia. The ancient 
Greeks celebrated a holiday in honor of a mythological mother of gods. 
Ancient Romans celebrated their mother goddess symbol. In the British 
Isles and Celtic Europe, the people honored the goddess Brigid in a 
spring celebration of motherhood.
  Mother's Day in America got its start in West Virginia in 1858, led 
by Anna Reeves Jarvis, a local schoolteacher. After years of strenuous 
petitioning, Mother's Day finally became an official American holiday 
in 1914. It was passed by the U.S. Congress as a joint resolution and 
signed by President Woodrow Wilson.
  Today, 90 years later, Mother's Day is celebrated all over the 
world--all over the world--including Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, 
Australia, and Belgium.
  It is celebrated by the humble and by the proud throughout the ages 
and across continents.
  Abraham Lincoln said of his mom:

       All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

  Human nature does bind us to our mothers. The Bible instructs us to 
respect and obey them. Mothers give us the gift we can never return--
life itself.
  I will close with a quote by the basketball legend Kareem Abdul 
Jabar. His mom knew him well, and I suspect never stopped looking after 
him. He once confessed:

       My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth 
     certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty 
     cents the adults had to pay.

  I do want to wish a happy Mother's Day to all of the mothers of the 
world.
  To my own mother, who I miss very much, her daily image comes down on 
just about everything I do in terms of what she might have done, what 
she would do, what she would whisper into my ear to do.
  To my own wife, Karyn, the mother of our three boys, Jonathan, 
Harrison, and Bryan, I say thank you, I love you. You are the rock that 
holds our family together and makes everything possible.

                          ____________________