[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 8755]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              MOTHER'S DAY

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, this Sunday a lot of families will be 
celebrating a very special day, a day of joy, a day of thankfulness, 
and for some a day of sadness due to the fact that their loved ones, 
their mothers, have passed.
  Restaurants are going to be packed for Sunday brunch. Living rooms 
are going to be full of fidgety children. Families are going to recall 
teasing stories, all to tell their moms that they love them.
  Mother's Day is the busiest long-distance calling day of the year. It 
accounts for more than one-fifth of all of the floral purchases made 
for the holidays. I am looking forward to our own holiday with our 
family, going to church, celebrating Mother's Day with our immediate 
family, and then later in the day joining an extended family and some 
old friends for another Mother's Day dinner.
  Celebrating moms is a tradition that stretches back millennia. 
Ancient Greeks celebrated a holiday in honor of Rhea, the mythological 
mother of gods. Ancient Romans celebrated their mother goddess symbol, 
Cybele, and in the British Isles and Celtic Europe, the people honored 
the goddess, Brigid, and later her successor, St. Brigid, in a spring 
tradition of motherhood.
  Mother's Day in America got its start in West Virginia in 1858, led 
by the indefatigable Anna Reeves Jarvis, a local schoolteacher. After 
years of petitioning, Mother's Day finally became an official American 
holiday in 1914, and it was passed in the Congress as a joint 
resolution and signed by President Woodrow Wilson.
  Today, 90 years later, Mother's Day is celebrated all over the world, 
not just in the United States--in Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, 
Australia, Belgium.
  Abraham Lincoln said of his mom: All that I am or hope to be, I owe 
to my angel mother.
  It is a sentiment that is shared by the humble and by the lofty, 
throughout the ages and across the continents. Human nature binds us to 
our mothers. The Bible instructs us to respect and obey our mothers, 
and in turn mothers give us that gift that there is no way to return, 
that ultimate gift, the gift of life.
  I close on this tribute to Mother's Day and all the mothers who are 
listening and to all the families who have lost their mothers with a 
quote by the basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I think it speaks 
to how we all remember our moms--looking after us, taking care of all 
the little details, reminding us of the things we would miss as we are 
growing up, understanding all our unique attributes we might have, as 
we think of that basketball legend. Kareem said:

       My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth 
     certificate so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra 50 cents 
     the adults had to pay.

  Yes, it is the moms who were thinking about what we never necessarily 
thought of, looking at each of us as those very special instruments of 
life.
  So happy Mother's Day to all the mothers around the world and to my 
mom, who died 6 years ago. I miss her very much. To my wife Karyn's 
mom, Kathryn McLaughlin in Ft Worth, TX, happy Mother's Day; and of 
course most especially to my wife Karyn, who is the rock of our family, 
who keeps it all together.

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