How a Holiday Built on Grief Became the Most Loaded Day on the American Calendar — and What Every Gesture, Color, and Carnation Actually Means
There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of every second Sunday in May, when the sentiment becomes too large to hold. The card was chosen from a rack of forty nearly identical cards. The brunch reservation was made six weeks in advance. The flowers — almost certainly carnations, or roses, or something that approximates tenderness in botanical form — were wrapped in cellophane and purchased from a place that smelled faintly of refrigeration and hope. And yet none of it, somehow, feels adequate to the occasion. This is the paradox at the heart of Mother’s Day: a holiday that attempts to symbolize the unsymbolizable, to compress into a single calendar square the full, terrifying, gorgeous weight of what it means to be brought into the world by another person.
What follows is an attempt to understand what all of it actually means — the flowers and the colors, the specific grief of the holiday’s origins, the way different cultures have encoded motherhood into ritual, the symbols that have accrued around the idea of “mother” across five thousand years of human civilization. It is not a shopping guide. It is something closer to an archaeology.
Part One: The Birth of a Holiday, and What It Was Always Really About
1.1 Anna Jarvis and the Violence of Commercialization
To understand what Mother’s Day symbols mean, you must first understand that the holiday was born in mourning, not celebration — and that its founder spent the last decades of her life trying to destroy what she had created.
Anna Marie Jarvis was born in 1864 in Webster, West Virginia, the ninth child of Ann Reeves Jarvis, a woman who had devoted much of her adult life to organizing “Mother’s Work Days” in the years around the Civil War. These were not sentimental occasions. They were public health campaigns, organized by mothers to combat the typhoid and other diseases that were killing their children. Ann Reeves Jarvis was a woman who understood that care was political, that love was sometimes indistinguishable from organizing, that the work of motherhood extended far beyond the domestic threshold.
When Ann Reeves Jarvis died on May 9, 1905, her daughter Anna — who had never married, never had children of her own — was devastated in the particular way that only adult children who have organized their entire emotional lives around a parent can be devastated. She began campaigning almost immediately for a national holiday to honor mothers. She wrote letters to congressmen, ministers, business leaders. She was persistent in the way that grief makes people persistent.
On May 10, 1908, the first official Mother’s Day service was held at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Anna Jarvis sent five hundred white carnations — her mother’s favorite flower — to be distributed to the mothers in the congregation. The carnation, with its ruffled, layered petals and its scent that seems to intensify as the flower ages, became the first official symbol of the holiday. White for mothers who had died. Colored — red, pink — for mothers still living.
By 1914, Woodrow Wilson had signed a proclamation making Mother’s Day a national holiday, to be observed on the second Sunday of May. Anna Jarvis had achieved what she set out to achieve. And then, almost immediately, she began to understand what she had done.
The commercialization came faster than anyone anticipated. Florists began charging extraordinary sums for carnations. Candy companies marketed Mother’s Day boxes. Greeting card manufacturers — Hallmark among them, though the company had only been founded in 1910 — began producing cards by the millions. Anna Jarvis, watching the holiday she had invented in a spirit of grief and genuine filial devotion be absorbed into the machinery of American consumer capitalism, was furious. She called the greeting card industry “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.” She staged protests at candy conventions. She was arrested, in 1948, at a protest against the commercialization of Mother’s Day — a protest she organized herself, against the holiday she herself had created.
She died that same year, in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, blind and partially deaf, her medical bills paid in part by the very florists and greeting card manufacturers she had spent decades denouncing. She was ninety-two years old.
What are we to make of this origin story? It is, first of all, a story about the relationship between private grief and public ritual — about what happens when personal mourning gets scaled into national commemoration. But it is also a story about symbols and their tendency to escape the intentions of those who deploy them. Anna Jarvis chose the carnation because it meant something specific to her: her mother’s favorite flower, a thing of delicate, layered beauty, a symbol of a particular woman’s particular love. The moment that symbol entered the marketplace, it began to mean something else — something more generic, more commercially legible, more available to mass deployment. This tension — between the specific and the generic, between the personal symbol and the mass-produced one — is at the heart of everything that Mother’s Day symbolism has become.
1.2 The Older Mothers: From Cybele to the Church
But if Anna Jarvis invented Mother’s Day as we now observe it, she did not invent the impulse to celebrate motherhood in springtime. That impulse is considerably older than the United States, older than Christianity, older than most of the civilizations whose names we still recognize.
The ancient Greeks observed a spring festival in honor of Rhea, the mother of the gods — the Titan who swallowed stones to save her children from their devouring father Cronus. Rhea is a figure of enormous mythological power: a mother who suffers, who is victimized, who nonetheless finds a way to protect her children. Her festival was held in the spring, when the earth itself was understood to be engaged in acts of generative abundance.
The Romans had Cybele, the Magna Mater, the Great Mother, a goddess imported from Phrygia (in what is now Turkey) around 204 BCE. Her cult was ecstatic, dramatic, characterized by music and processions and the kind of ritualized grief that the Romans found simultaneously foreign and compelling. The festival in her honor, the Hilaria, was held in late March and involved three days of mourning followed by three days of rejoicing — a pattern that would not look entirely alien to anyone familiar with the rhythms of Christian Holy Week.
In medieval England, the fourth Sunday of Lent became known as “Mothering Sunday,” a day when apprentices and servants were given leave to return to their home parishes — their “mother churches” — and, by extension, to visit their own mothers. They often brought gifts of simnel cake, a fruit cake decorated with marzipan that has its own complex symbolic vocabulary. Mothering Sunday has continued in Britain and Ireland as a distinct tradition from the American Mother’s Day, though the two have increasingly merged in the popular imagination.
What all of these traditions share is a recognition that the relationship between children and mothers — or between humanity and the earth that sustains it, or between the individual soul and the institution that formed it — requires ritual marking. The impulse to symbolize is, in this sense, as old as the relationship itself.
Part Two: The Carnation and Its Meanings
2.1 A Flower’s Biography
The carnation — Dianthus caryophyllus, a name that translates from the Greek as roughly “divine flower of Zeus” — has been cultivated for at least two thousand years. It appears in Greek and Roman decorative art. It features in the paintings of the Flemish masters, where it often appears in the hands of the Virgin Mary or the Christ child as a symbol of love, betrothal, and the promise of redemption. In the language of flowers — the Victorian system of floriography, in which specific blooms carried specific coded messages — the carnation occupied a particularly complex position, its meaning shifting dramatically depending on color.
Anna Jarvis was not unaware of this history when she chose the carnation as her holiday’s defining symbol. She chose it, she said, because it was her mother’s favorite flower, but she also spoke about the carnation’s specific qualities as metaphors for maternal love: its long-lasting fragrance (a mother’s influence endures), its ruffled, layered petals (the complexity of maternal devotion), its ability to thrive in a wide range of conditions (the adaptability required of mothers). Whether or not she intended all of these meanings consciously, they were available in the cultural atmosphere of the early twentieth century to anyone paying attention.
2.2 The Color Code: White, Red, and Pink
The distinction Jarvis drew between white carnations (for mothers who had died) and colored carnations (for living mothers) has its roots in a broader Victorian and Edwardian color symbolism that was considerably more codified than we might assume. White, in the symbolism of the period, meant purity, memory, and spiritual elevation — qualities associated with the dead, who were understood to have moved beyond the complications of earthly existence into a purer state. Colored flowers, particularly red and pink, meant life, love, warmth, the heat of present-tense feeling.
This distinction is still observed in some parts of the world, though it has largely faded in the United States, where carnations of any color are now understood to mean simply “Mother’s Day flower” — a semantic flattening that would have horrified Anna Jarvis and would have struck the Victorians as a kind of cultural impoverishment.
In the language of flowers as codified by various Victorian floriographers, including the influential Madame de la Tour (whose Le langage des fleurs appeared in 1818 and was widely translated), different colored carnations carried different specific meanings:
White carnations: pure love, good luck, pure love, faithfulness, remembrance of the dead. In some traditions, white carnations were associated specifically with a mother’s enduring love — love that transcends death.
Red carnations: deep love, admiration, deep affection. In the broader symbolism of red flowers across many cultures, red means the blood of life, the heart’s passion, the courage of love that doesn’t flinch.
Pink carnations: gratitude, a mother’s love. Of all the carnation colors, pink has become most specifically associated with Mother’s Day in the popular imagination — a softer love than red, warmer than white, a middle ground that captures the specific quality of maternal affection as it is idealized in American culture.
Yellow carnations: disdain, disappointment (though this meaning is rarely invoked on Mother’s Day for obvious reasons).
Purple carnations: capriciousness, unpredictability — again, rarely featured in the holiday’s floral vocabulary.
Striped carnations: a refusal of love, a sorry-I-can’t-be-with-you message that makes striped carnations among the most accidentally inappropriate gifts in the floriographic tradition.
2.3 Why the Carnation Lost Its Crown
By the mid-twentieth century, the rose had begun to displace the carnation as the most popular Mother’s Day flower in the United States — a shift that reflects something real about changing cultural values and floral economics. Roses, which had been expensive luxuries in the early twentieth century, became dramatically cheaper as large-scale flower farming expanded in Colombia and other countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The carnation, which had been the choice of Jarvis partly because it was relatively affordable and widely available, found itself repositioned as the “cheap” flower — a perception that is floriculturally absurd (carnations are in many ways more complex and interesting than roses) but culturally decisive.
The rose’s displacement of the carnation as the dominant Mother’s Day symbol is itself a story worth examining. The rose carries meanings that differ significantly from the carnation’s. Where the carnation suggests layered complexity, endurance, and a certain working-class dignity (it has always been the flower of the labor movement, worn on lapels at union rallies), the rose suggests romantic passion, classical beauty, and a certain aspirational elegance. The shift from carnation to rose in the Mother’s Day floral vocabulary might be read as a shift in how American culture wants to frame maternal love — away from the labor and complexity that Jarvis had in mind, toward a more aestheticized, romanticized, and frankly more commercially exploitable ideal.
Part Three: Colors and Their Symbolic Weight
3.1 The Pink Problem
Pink is the dominant color of Mother’s Day in American commercial culture, and it is a color with a surprisingly complicated symbolic history. In the eighteenth century, pink was considered a masculine color — a lighter, more delicate shade of the robust, powerful red associated with military and aristocratic authority. Blue was associated with the Virgin Mary and with feminine delicacy. The reversal of these associations happened gradually through the nineteenth century and was essentially complete by the 1920s, around the time that Mother’s Day was being established as a national institution.
The pinkification of Mother’s Day is thus, in part, a product of a particular historical moment in gender symbolism. Pink had just become “feminine” in the broad cultural sense, and Mother’s Day had just been established as a holiday about femininity in its most idealized form. The convergence was almost overdetermined.
But pink also carries meanings that are more specifically relevant to the holiday’s emotional register. Pink is the color of the blush, of warmth, of the rosy flush of health and vitality. It sits between white (purity, death, spiritual elevation) and red (passion, blood, intensity) — which makes it a reasonable visual analog for the specific emotional register of maternal love as idealized in American culture: warm but not sexually charged, loving but not overwhelming, present but not consuming.
The psychological research on pink is interesting in this context. The color has been shown in various studies to have a calming effect — it is associated with nurturing, warmth, and a softening of aggression. This is presumably one reason why it became associated with femininity and, by extension, with motherhood: it encodes, visually, the qualities that patriarchal culture has historically assigned to the maternal role.
This is also, of course, one reason why the dominance of pink in Mother’s Day symbolism has attracted feminist criticism. The color palette of the holiday encodes a set of assumptions about what mothers are and what they are for — soft, gentle, nurturing, emotionally available — that many people find both limiting and politically suspect. We will return to this dimension of the holiday’s symbolism at greater length.
3.2 White and the Memory of Mothers Gone
If pink is the color of living mothers, white — as Anna Jarvis established from the very beginning — is the color of mothers who have died. This is consistent with the broader Western symbolic tradition, in which white is the color of ghosts, of the transcendent, of the spiritually elevated. In Eastern traditions, white is even more explicitly associated with mourning and death; it is the color worn at funerals in China, Japan, Korea, and India, in contrast to the black that Western funerary custom prefers.
White carnations on Mother’s Day thus carry a double meaning: they honor the mother who is gone, and they situate the holiday within a memorial tradition that predates Anna Jarvis’s intervention by thousands of years. The white flower is an offering to the dead, a continuation of the practice of leaving flowers at graves that appears in cultures from ancient Greece to contemporary Japan.
The specific power of the white carnation as a memorial symbol is worth dwelling on. Flowers that are placed on graves or offered to the dead serve several symbolic functions simultaneously: they acknowledge the reality of death, they express the ongoing love of those who survive, they provide a sensory bridge between the living and the dead (the scent of a flower was understood in many traditions as a means of communication between worlds), and they assert the continuity of life — the fact that something still grows, still blooms, even in the shadow of loss.
When Anna Jarvis pinned white carnations to the lapels of mourners at that first Mother’s Day service in 1908, she was doing all of these things at once. She was acknowledging her own grief, expressing her ongoing love for her dead mother, and asserting — through the act of giving flowers in a church on a spring morning — that life and beauty and devotion continued even in the presence of loss.
3.3 The Red and the Gold: International Color Variations
Different cultures have developed different color vocabularies for the celebration of mothers and motherhood, and examining these variations reveals something important about the cultural assumptions encoded in color symbolism.
In Mexico, Mother’s Day (El Día de las Madres) is celebrated on May 10th every year, without the “second Sunday” variability of the American holiday. The dominant color is not pink but the rich, warm spectrum of the cempasúchil — the marigold — which also features in Día de Muertos symbolism. The marigold’s golden orange is a color associated in Mexican Catholic and indigenous traditions with both the warmth of the sun and the warmth of familial love; it bridges the living and the dead in a way that pink, with its exclusively life-associated connotations, cannot.
In Japan, where Mother’s Day was introduced in the 1930s partly as a celebration of the “good wife, wise mother” ideal promoted by the Meiji and early Showa governments, the dominant color is also pink — but the specific shade and the flowers associated with it differ from the American tradition. Japanese Mother’s Day celebrations center on the carnation, maintaining the Jarvis-era symbolism in a way that American culture has largely abandoned. Red carnations are the most popular gift, with pink as a secondary choice.
In France, the Fête des Mères (Mother’s Day) is celebrated on the last Sunday of May, and the symbolic vocabulary is somewhat more restrained and secular than the American version — which is to say, the colors are less rigidly coded, and the gift traditions involve less floriculture and more food.
In India, where no single “Mother’s Day” tradition exists (the holiday is observed on the second Sunday of May in some urban, Western-influenced contexts, but has no roots in indigenous religious or cultural practice), the colors associated with motherhood tend to be drawn from the broader Hindu symbolic vocabulary: red (shakti, the divine feminine energy), gold (prosperity, divine blessing), and the deep orange of marigolds (sacred offerings).
Part Four: The Rose and Its Rivals
4.1 Rosa — The Queen of Flowers
No flower in the Western symbolic tradition carries more accumulated meaning than the rose. It has been the flower of Venus and of the Virgin Mary, of romantic love and of political revolution (the red rose of socialism, the white rose of the Tudors), of secrecy (sub rosa, “under the rose,” meaning in confidence) and of public display. It appears in the poetry of Sappho and Shakespeare and Rumi, in the political iconography of the British Labour Party and the Social Democratic parties of Europe, in the mystical tradition of Rosicrucianism, in the Catholic rosary, in the symbolic vocabulary of Freemasonry.
On Mother’s Day, the rose carries all of this accumulated meaning, though most of it is dormant — present in the cultural substrate but not actively invoked when someone hands their mother a dozen red roses. What is actively invoked is simpler and more direct: the rose as an emblem of love, beauty, and the desire to give something precious.
The specific colors of roses carry meanings that parallel those of carnations but with their own distinct inflections:
Red roses: passionate love, deep respect, courage, beauty. On Mother’s Day, red roses signal the intensity of the child’s love for the mother — a love that is, in the cultural mythology of the holiday, the original and most fundamental human love.
Pink roses: grace, gratitude, gentle feelings, joy. Pink roses are probably the most commonly given on Mother’s Day, for the same reasons that pink generally dominates the holiday’s color palette: they occupy a middle ground between the intensity of red and the ethereality of white.
White roses: purity, innocence, remembrance. White roses carry, like white carnations, a memorial dimension — they are appropriate for mothers who have died, and they signal the spiritual elevation that the holiday’s Christian roots associate with virtuous motherhood.
Yellow roses: friendship, warmth, caring. Yellow roses are sometimes given on Mother’s Day to signal a relationship of friendship and mutual respect rather than the more intense filial love signaled by red or pink.
Lavender roses: enchantment, love at first sight, wonder. Lavender roses have become increasingly popular on Mother’s Day in recent decades, perhaps because their color — neither the conventional pink nor the conventional red — suggests a love that is individualized, specific, not reducible to generic sentiment.
Orange roses: enthusiasm, passion, energy. Orange roses are relatively uncommon on Mother’s Day but have gained some traction as the holiday has been reconceived, in some marketing contexts, as a celebration of active, energetic, “fun” mothers rather than the more traditional sentimental ideal.
4.2 The Peony: An Undersung Symbol
If the carnation and the rose dominate the popular imagination, the peony — Paeonia, named for Paeon, the physician of the gods in Greek mythology — may be the most symbolically rich flower that Mother’s Day has not yet fully claimed, though it is increasingly popular as a Mother’s Day gift.
The peony blooms in May in temperate climates, which makes it naturally seasonally appropriate for the holiday. But its symbolic associations go deeper than timing. In Chinese culture, the peony (mǔdān, 牡丹) is explicitly associated with motherhood, feminine beauty, and prosperity. It is sometimes called the “king of flowers” in Chinese tradition, a designation that paradoxically emphasizes its association with feminine power and authority. The peony in Chinese art — from Song dynasty ceramics to contemporary graphic design — is an image of abundant, generous, full-blown beauty: a flower that holds nothing back, that gives everything it has in the brief time of its blooming.
In Victorian floriography, the peony signified bashfulness and shame — an association that derives from the Greek myth in which Paeon was transformed into a peony flower to save him from the wrath of Asclepius, whom he had outshone in the art of healing. But this Victorian meaning has largely been superseded, at least in American culture, by the Chinese-influenced association with beauty, prosperity, and generous love.
The peony’s physical characteristics reinforce its symbolic associations: it is extravagantly multi-petaled, its blooms expanding from tight bud to full, luxurious flower over the course of several days, its scent intensifying as it opens. It is, in its physical form, an image of abundance unfolding over time — which is not a bad metaphor for what good motherhood looks like.
4.3 Lilies, Daisies, and the Humbler Flowers
Not all Mother’s Day flowers carry the freighted symbolic weight of roses and carnations. Lilies, particularly stargazer lilies, have become popular Mother’s Day gifts, partly for their dramatic appearance and strong fragrance and partly because the lily carries Christian associations (it is the flower of the Annunciation, of the Virgin Mary, of purity and divine favor) that make it symbolically appropriate for a holiday with religious roots.
Daisies, on the other hand, carry meanings that are very different from the rose’s stately significance. The daisy is the flower of innocence, simplicity, and childlike affection — which is why the stereotypical “homemade Mother’s Day gift” so often features a drawing or arrangement of daisies. When a child gives their mother daisies, they are giving a flower that is symbolically coded as belonging to their own world rather than to the adult world of roses and carnations. There is something touching about this — the child offering the mother a flower that says “this is who I am” rather than “this is what you deserve.”
Sunflowers have also gained popularity as Mother’s Day gifts in recent years, partly through deliberate marketing (their large size and cheerful color photograph well, which matters in the age of Instagram) and partly because of their symbolism. The sunflower’s habit of heliotropism — its turning toward the light — has been understood in various symbolic traditions as an image of devotion, of the soul’s orientation toward the divine or toward those it loves. Giving a mother sunflowers is, in this reading, a way of saying: I turn toward you the way these flowers turn toward the sun.
Part Five: Beyond Flowers — The Complete Symbolic Vocabulary
5.1 The Heart: Love Made Visible
If the carnation is the official symbol of Mother’s Day, the heart is the unofficial but perhaps more pervasive one. Heart imagery — in cards, in decorations, in the arrangement of strawberries on a plate — pervades the holiday’s visual vocabulary in a way that connects it to the broader iconography of love across Western culture.
The heart as a symbol of love has a history that is considerably more complicated than its ubiquity might suggest. The stylized heart shape (♥) that appears on Valentine’s Day cards and Mother’s Day cards and tattoos and emoji does not actually resemble the human heart — it bears far more resemblance to the heart of various animals, particularly the swine heart, or to the seed of the silphium plant, which was used as a contraceptive in ancient Cyrene and whose silhouette on coins may have established the heart-equals-love association in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Alternatively, the heart shape may derive from various stylizations of the human female body — the curve of buttocks, the shape of a woman’s torso, the visual forms that aroused and inspired artists from the Paleolithic to the Renaissance. In this reading, the heart symbol encodes not just “love” in the abstract but specifically the embodied, sexually charged love of the erotic tradition — which makes its appearance on Mother’s Day cards a curious act of desexualization, a stripping away of the erotic origins of the symbol in favor of its domesticated sentimental meaning.
By the medieval period, the heart had become firmly associated with love in the courtly tradition, and by the early modern period it was the dominant symbol of affective life across European culture. On Mother’s Day, the heart appears as a straightforward sign of love — but it carries within it this long history of desire, devotion, and the attempt to give visible form to an invisible feeling.
5.2 The Infinity Symbol and the Knot: Endurance and Binding
Among the newer additions to the Mother’s Day symbolic vocabulary — newer meaning, largely, post-1990 — are the infinity symbol (∞) and various versions of the Celtic knot, both of which appear frequently on Mother’s Day jewelry. These symbols share a common meaning: they represent love or connection that has no end, that loops back on itself, that cannot be severed.
The infinity symbol has its origins in mathematics — it was introduced by the English mathematician John Wallis in 1655 — but has been thoroughly absorbed into popular symbolic culture, where it means simply “forever” or “without limit.” On a Mother’s Day necklace, it says: my love for you is boundless, my connection to you is permanent, our relationship does not end.
The Celtic knot is older and more culturally specific. Celtic knotwork — the interlaced, unending patterns that appear in Irish and Scottish metalwork, illuminated manuscripts, and stone carvings — represents the interconnectedness of all things, the idea that life and love and time weave together into patterns that have no clear beginning and no clear end. The specific application of Celtic knotwork to family relationships is a relatively modern development (much of what is sold as “Celtic symbolism” in the gift industry is a twentieth-century invention or reconstruction), but it draws on genuinely ancient traditions of knotted and interlaced symbolism that appear in cultures from pre-Christian Ireland to ancient China.
The triquetra — three interlocked arcs forming a triangular knot — is particularly common in Mother’s Day jewelry, often interpreted as representing mother, father, and child, or past, present, and future, or the three aspects of the divine feminine in Celtic tradition (maiden, mother, crone). Whatever the specific interpretation, the triquetra’s appeal lies in its visual suggestion of things that are separate becoming bound together in a pattern that is stronger and more complete than any of its component parts.
5.3 The Anchor: Stability in an Unstable World
“Mom is my anchor” — it is a phrase that appears on countless Mother’s Day cards, and the anchor has become a recurring motif in the holiday’s visual vocabulary, appearing on jewelry, mugs, tote bags, and decorative pillows. The appeal of the anchor as a maternal symbol is not difficult to understand: it represents stability, the quality of holding firm against the currents and tides of the world.
The anchor has a long history as a symbol of hope in Christian iconography, where it represents the hope that holds the soul steady in the storms of earthly life. In secular contexts, it represents rootedness, permanence, and the kind of reliable presence that the idealized mother is supposed to provide. An anchor sunk deep into the seabed doesn’t prevent the ship from moving through the water; it prevents the ship from being driven off course, from drifting into dangerous shallows, from losing its position entirely. This is a reasonably accurate metaphor for what a steady, reliable maternal presence does for a child: not preventing movement and growth, but providing a fixed point of orientation that makes movement and growth possible.
The anchor also has associations with sailors — with those who are far from home, who navigate uncertain waters, who look back toward a fixed point of safety. Many of the most powerful Mother’s Day anchor images are associated with military service, with the idea of a mother as the home port to which the soldier or sailor hopes to return. This gives the anchor symbol a dimension of longing and absence that is often absent from the more celebratory floral imagery of the holiday.
5.4 The Butterfly: Transformation and New Life
Butterflies appear frequently in the visual vocabulary of Mother’s Day, particularly on cards and decorative items associated with the holiday’s spring timing. The butterfly is one of the most universal symbols of transformation and new life across human cultures — its metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to winged creature is an almost irresistibly powerful metaphor for rebirth, change, and the emergence of a more beautiful self from an earlier, less developed state.
In the context of Mother’s Day, the butterfly can carry several meanings. It can represent the mother herself — a person who has undergone transformation through the experience of becoming a mother, who has shed an earlier self and emerged into a new identity. It can represent the child, who has been given the conditions of growth by the mother and emerged into independent life. And it can represent the relationship between them — a thing of delicate beauty that exists only because both parties have allowed it to develop, a fragile and extraordinary thing that takes flight.
In some cultural traditions, particularly in Mexican and indigenous American contexts, butterflies are associated with the dead — with the souls of those who have passed returning to visit the living. Monarch butterflies, which migrate to Mexico in time for Día de Muertos, are understood in some traditions as carrying the souls of the departed. This gives butterfly imagery on Mother’s Day a potential memorial dimension that parallels the white carnation’s role in honoring mothers who have died.
Part Six: Maternal Archetypes and Their Symbols
6.1 The Great Mother
Long before Anna Jarvis organized her grief into a national holiday, human beings had been symbolizing motherhood in forms that persist into our own time. The oldest of these is the figure that scholars of mythology and religion call the Great Mother — the divine feminine in her aspect as the source of all life, the matrix from which existence emerges.
The Great Mother appears in Paleolithic female figurines — the Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Laussel, dozens of others — objects dating back thirty thousand years or more that emphasize the body’s reproductive capacities: large breasts, wide hips, the swelling belly of pregnancy. These are not, scholars now generally believe, pornographic objects; they are religious ones, attempts to render in three-dimensional form the principle of generative abundance that ancient peoples associated with the female body and, by extension, with the earth itself.
The Great Mother is a figure with two faces that scholarship has long recognized: the nurturing, life-giving face (what Erich Neumann, in his influential 1955 study, called the “positive” or “elementary” aspect) and the devouring, death-dealing face (the “negative” or “transformative” aspect). She gives life and she takes it back; she nurtures and she consumes; she is the earth that feeds us and the earth into which we are all eventually returned.
The symbols associated with the Great Mother in her various cultural manifestations include:
The moon: associated with the feminine in virtually every ancient culture, the moon governs the tides, the menstrual cycle, and the rhythms of planting and harvest. Its waxing and waning mirrors the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth. The crescent moon appears in the iconography of the Virgin Mary, of Isis, of Artemis/Diana, of Cybele, of the Islamic tradition (where it is associated with the divine and with the cyclical nature of time).
The earth itself: the concept of Mother Earth (Gaia, Terra, Pachamama, various others) identifies the maternal principle with the ground beneath our feet, the soil that receives the seed and gives back the harvest. In virtually every agricultural civilization, the earth has been understood as feminine and maternal — a being who labors to bring forth life, who feeds her children, and into whose embrace all living things eventually return.
Water: rivers, seas, springs, and wells have been associated with the maternal across cultures. Water gives life (it is the first environment of the developing embryo, contained in the amniotic fluid), it sustains life, and in its deeper, darker forms (the ocean, the underground spring) it suggests the mystery and danger of the maternal depths. The sea is called “mother” in countless traditions; rivers are goddesses; springs are the entry points of divine generative power into the human world.
The cave: as a hollow space in the earth, the cave has been understood since at least the Paleolithic as a maternal symbol — the womb of the earth, the place of shelter, warmth, and generation. The earliest known human art is found in caves, a fact that has led some scholars to speculate that the cave was itself understood as sacred, as the body of the Great Mother into which humans descended to make contact with divine generative power.
The spiral: appearing in Neolithic art across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the spiral is associated with the cycles of nature, with growth, with the generative processes of the cosmic feminine. Modern Mother’s Day iconography rarely invokes the spiral explicitly, but the curling forms of many floral arrangements and decorative elements echo it.
6.2 The Virgin Mother: Purity and Impossible Ideals
The figure of the Virgin Mary represents a specific and enormously influential version of the maternal archetype — one that has shaped Western ideas about motherhood and Mother’s Day symbolism in ways that often go unacknowledged.
The Virgin Mother is a paradox: a woman who gives birth without sexual activity, who is simultaneously a mother and a virgin, who embodies the cultural ideal of feminine purity while also performing the most physically demanding act of embodied femininity. This paradox is not incidental; it is the point. The Virgin Mother represents the desire to have maternity without the erotic — to honor the mother while suppressing the sexual body that makes motherhood possible.
The symbols associated with the Virgin Mary in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have become, through centuries of Christian cultural dominance, the symbols of idealized motherhood in the West more broadly:
The lily: the white lily, particularly the Madonna lily (Lilium candidum), is the Marian flower par excellence. It represents purity, chastity, and the divine favor that makes Mary the bearer of the divine. In countless Annunciation paintings, the angel Gabriel is shown offering the Virgin a lily as he delivers the news of her miraculous pregnancy. The lily on Mother’s Day thus carries this long history of association between the maternal and the spiritually elevated, the pure, the beyond-the-merely-physical.
The rose: Mary is called the “rose without thorns” in Catholic devotional poetry — the rose that represents the perfection of divine love without the wounds that ordinary love inflicts. The rosary itself takes its name from the rose; it is, etymologically, a “garland of roses” offered to the Mother of God. The rose garden is a traditional setting for Marian apparitions and visions, and the phrase “rose garden” carries strong maternal connotations in the Western poetic tradition.
Blue: Marian blue — the deep, lapis lazuli blue of the Virgin’s robe in medieval and Renaissance paintings — is one of the most powerful colors in the Western symbolic tradition. It represents heaven, divinity, constancy, and the protective canopy of divine love. The choice of blue for Mary’s robe was originally practical (lapis lazuli was the most expensive pigment available, and artists used it for the most important figures), but it became invested with symbolic meaning over centuries of repetition. The association of blue with femininity (which, remember, is the opposite of the pink-feminine, blue-masculine coding that now dominates our culture) persisted well into the nineteenth century.
The crescent moon and stars: in many traditions of Marian iconography, particularly in Latin America and in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mary is shown standing on a crescent moon and surrounded by stars. These are symbols borrowed from the older tradition of goddess imagery — the moon and stars as emblems of the cosmic feminine, the night sky as the body of the Great Mother.
6.3 The Warrior Mother: Boadicea, Kali, and the Protective Rage
The Great Mother has a face that is not gentle. Across cultures, the maternal archetype includes a warrior aspect — a mother in the mode of protection rather than nurturing, a figure whose love expresses itself not as softness but as ferocity.
In the Hindu tradition, this aspect is most fully embodied by the goddess Kali. Kali is the goddess of time, creation, destruction, and power; she is often depicted with dark blue or black skin, a garland of skulls, a protruding tongue, and weapons in several of her four hands. She is terrifying by design — but her terror is understood as protective. She destroys what threatens her devotees; she dances on the body of death itself to show that she has conquered it. The symbols associated with Kali — the skull, the sword, the severed head, the cremation ground — are symbols of the mother’s willingness to confront mortality itself in defense of those she loves.
The Yoruba tradition includes Oya, the goddess of storms, winds, and change — a figure of tremendous power who governs the transitions between states of being, the crossroads between life and death. Oya is sometimes associated with motherhood in her aspect as a figure who facilitates birth (which is, of course, a kind of storm, a violent transition) and who protects those who are vulnerable.
In the Western historical tradition, the figure of Boadicea — the British queen who led a rebellion against the Roman occupation in approximately 60 CE — has served as an image of the warrior mother: a woman who fought, in the cultural memory that has been built around her, to protect her children and her people from violation and oppression. The symbols associated with Boadicea (the chariot, the red hair, the sword) are not conventionally maternal symbols, but they have been incorporated into certain strands of feminist and nationalist iconography as emblems of a different kind of maternal power — not the nurturing power of the Great Mother, but the righteous violence of the protector.
Mother’s Day symbolism has largely suppressed this warrior dimension of the maternal archetype. The holiday’s dominant visual vocabulary is one of softness, flowers, pastels, and sentimentality — a vocabulary that encodes a particular cultural fantasy of what mothers are like, a fantasy that is explicitly opposed to the complexity and ferocity of figures like Kali or Boadicea. This suppression is not innocent; it is part of a broader cultural project of domesticating and sentimentalizing the maternal in ways that suit the interests of those who benefit from the unpaid labor that idealized mothers are expected to perform.
Part Seven: The Symbolism of Maternal Labor
7.1 The Apron and the Kitchen
Among the most persistent symbols of Mother’s Day is the image of the mother in the kitchen — presiding over a stove, surrounded by the smells of food that is being prepared with love. This image is so familiar as to be almost invisible, but it is worth examining with some care, because it encodes a great deal about the cultural politics of maternal symbolism.
The apron, in particular, functions as a kind of shorthand for the role of the domestic mother — the woman whose primary sphere of activity is the home, whose love is expressed through feeding, whose identity is organized around the maintenance of the family’s physical needs. The apron is a practical garment (it protects clothing from the mess of food preparation), but it is also a symbolic one (it signals the wearer’s assumption of a particular domestic role, a particular relationship to the labor of care).
Mother’s Day gifts that play on this symbolism — the engraved rolling pin, the “World’s Best Mom” apron, the cookbook — are simultaneously celebrating and reinforcing a particular vision of maternal identity. They say: this is what mothers do, this is where mothers belong, this is how we honor you — by acknowledging and celebrating the domestic labor that defines you.
The feminist critique of this symbolism is well-established and important. These gifts honor maternal labor while leaving the social arrangements that require mothers to perform that labor completely unexamined. They celebrate the cook while doing nothing to share the cooking; they appreciate the caregiver while doing nothing to change the conditions that make caregiving, disproportionately, women’s work.
But the symbolism of food and cooking on Mother’s Day is also more complex than this critique entirely captures. Food is, in virtually every human culture, one of the primary languages of love. The act of feeding another person — of transforming raw materials into nourishment through skill and effort, of attending to the particular preferences and needs of those you are feeding — is a profound act of care that cannot be entirely reduced to its exploitative dimensions. The mother who cooks for her family is doing something real and meaningful, even if the social structures that make her the one who cooks rather than others are unjust.
The Mother’s Day brunch, the family meal prepared (often by other family members) in honor of the mother, the breakfast in bed: these rituals involve a temporary reversal of the usual arrangement, a moment in which the mother is herself fed and served rather than feeding and serving others. This reversal is symbolically significant — it acknowledges the labor that mothers perform by temporarily relieving them of it, by allowing them to receive instead of give.
7.2 The Rocking Chair and the Cradle: Symbols of Care’s Work
Among the most enduring images of motherhood is the rocking chair — specifically, the image of the mother rocking a child to sleep. The rocking motion is, of course, a comfort to infants: it replicates the sensation of being carried, the rhythm of the mother’s walking body, the gentle motion of the womb itself. But the image of the rocking mother has accumulated symbolic meanings that go beyond this practical function.
The rocking chair is a symbol of patience — of the willingness to sit and rock for however long it takes, to repeat the same motion as many times as the child needs, to subordinate the adult’s own schedule and desires to the rhythm that the child requires. It is also a symbol of age and of the passage of time — the rocking chair is associated not just with mothers of infants but with grandmothers, with older women whose years of caregiving have accumulated into a kind of wisdom, who have earned the right to sit and rock at a slower pace.
The cradle itself is an ancient symbol of new life and maternal care. In the iconography of the Nativity, the manger in which the infant Jesus lies is understood as a cradle (though it is actually a feeding trough) — a symbol of the humble, material tenderness with which the divine chose to enter the world. The image of a child lying safely in a cradle, watched over by a mother, represents the fundamental human condition of vulnerability being met with protection and love.
In the language of nursery rhymes and folk songs, the cradle appears repeatedly as both a symbol of comfort and a symbol of danger — “Rock-a-bye Baby” is, beneath its soothing melody, a song about a cradle falling from a tree, a baby crashing to the ground. This double valence is appropriate: the cradle represents safety, but it also represents the precariousness of new life, the fragility of the infant who depends entirely on the care of others for its survival.
7.3 The Thread, the Needle, and the Quilt
In the symbolic vocabulary of pre-industrial and early industrial America, among the most powerful images of maternal love and labor is the quilt — the product of long hours of sewing, of the patient assembly of small pieces of fabric into a larger pattern, of warmth made from scraps and remnants.
The American quilt tradition has deep symbolic resonances. Quilts were made from clothing — from the worn-out garments of family members, from the dresses and shirts and trousers that had outlived their original use. A quilt is thus, in its materials, a kind of memory object: it contains the textile history of the family, the traces of bodies that have worn these fabrics, the accumulated material record of a life lived together.
The act of quilting was also, in the nineteenth century, a social activity — the quilting bee, in which women gathered to work together on a shared project, was one of the primary forms of female community and mutual aid in rural America. Quilts thus represent not just maternal love in the domestic, private sense, but also the bonds of female solidarity and collective care that have often gone unacknowledged in the official symbolic vocabulary of American culture.
The specific patterns of traditional American quilts carry their own symbolic meanings: the Bear Paw pattern (associated with the wilderness, with strength, with the native peoples of North America), the Log Cabin pattern (associated with the domestic hearth, with Lincoln and the frontier myth, with the warm center of a home that radiates outward), the Wedding Ring or Double Wedding Ring pattern (associated with love, commitment, and the interweaving of two lives), the Grandmother’s Flower Garden pattern (a hexagonal arrangement that evokes the formal garden of the Victorian period, a cultivated beauty created through patient labor).
When a quilt appears in Mother’s Day imagery — less commonly now than in earlier periods, but still present — it invokes this entire symbolic complex: the patient labor of love, the transformation of remnants into warmth and beauty, the social bonds of female community, and the specific history of American domestic life.
Part Eight: The Global Mothers — Symbols Across Cultures
8.1 Isis and the Egyptian Tradition
In ancient Egypt, the supreme maternal figure was Isis, the goddess whose myths shaped Egyptian religious life for three thousand years and whose influence extended far beyond Egypt’s borders, into the Roman world and ultimately into the iconographic traditions of the Virgin Mary.
Isis is the mother who gathers the scattered pieces of her husband Osiris after he is killed and dismembered by his brother Set, who reassembles his body, who uses her magical power to revive him just long enough to conceive their son Horus, who then raises Horus in hiding while he grows to manhood and eventually defeats Set to claim his father’s throne. It is a story of the mother as protector, healer, magical power, and fierce devotion — a mother who will not accept the finality of loss, who uses every resource at her command to preserve the continuity of life and love.
The symbols associated with Isis include the throne (her hieroglyph is the throne, and her name in ancient Egyptian means “throne” or “seat of power” — the mother as the seat upon which the king’s power rests), the cow’s horns and sun disk that she inherited from the earlier goddess Hathor (associating her with the fertile, generative earth and with the solar principle of life-giving light), the wings that she spreads to shelter and protect (the mother as a bird protecting her young beneath her wings), and the knot of Isis (the tyet, a symbol that appears in the context of protection and good health).
The image of Isis nursing the infant Horus — the divine mother and child — was so powerful and so widely distributed in the ancient Mediterranean world that many scholars see in it a direct precursor to the Christian iconography of the Madonna and Child. The composition is essentially the same: a seated or standing mother, a nursing or held infant, an atmosphere of divine tenderness and protection. The specific symbolic vocabulary changes (Isis’s cow horns become Mary’s halo; Horus’s falcon-headed maturity becomes implied rather than depicted), but the fundamental symbolic statement — mother and child as the center of the sacred — remains constant.
8.2 Amaterasu and the Japanese Tradition
In the Shinto tradition of Japan, the supreme deity is Amaterasu Ōmikami, the goddess of the sun — a female figure who stands at the head of the divine hierarchy and from whom the imperial family claims descent. Amaterasu is not primarily a maternal figure in the specific sense of motherhood (she does not have children in the central myths), but she embodies the creative, generative principle of the feminine in its divine form, and her relationship to the Japanese imperial line — as the ancestor from whom all authority ultimately derives — gives her a specific maternal quality.
The symbols associated with Amaterasu — the sun, the mirror (the Sacred Mirror, Yata no Kagami, is one of the three Imperial Treasures of Japan and is understood as an embodiment of Amaterasu herself), the weaving loom (Amaterasu is associated with weaving and with the productive labor of women in the divine realm) — provide an interesting counterpoint to the more specifically maternal symbolism of the Western tradition.
The Japanese celebration of Mother’s Day has developed its own symbolic vocabulary since the holiday’s introduction in the early twentieth century. Red carnations remain the dominant floral symbol, consistent with the original Jarvis tradition. But Japanese Mother’s Day celebrations also incorporate elements of the broader Japanese aesthetic tradition — the emphasis on elegance, restraint, and the appreciation of transient beauty (mono no aware) that runs through Japanese art and culture — which gives the holiday a somewhat different emotional register from the American original.
8.3 Pachamama and the Andean Tradition
In the indigenous cultures of the Andean region — the Quechua and Aymara peoples of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and surrounding areas — the supreme maternal figure is Pachamama, the World Mother, the Earth Mother who is simultaneously a goddess and the earth itself. Pachamama is not a figure who exists separately from nature and then represents it; she is nature, she is the earth, and to live on the earth is to live within her body.
The relationship between Andean peoples and Pachamama is maintained through ongoing ritual practices — the ch’alla, a ritual libation in which the first portion of any drink is poured on the ground as an offering to Pachamama; the pago, a more elaborate offering ceremony in which specific items are burned or buried as gifts; the communal labor practices that are understood as ways of working with rather than against the earth’s own generative processes.
The symbols associated with Pachamama are largely natural rather than manufactured: the earth itself, particular mountains (the Apus or mountain spirits are understood as the children of Pachamama), specific plants (particularly the coca plant, whose leaves are central to Andean ritual life), and certain animals (the condor, the puma, the serpent — the three levels of the Andean cosmos).
In the context of global discussions of Mother’s Day and its symbolism, Pachamama represents a fundamentally different understanding of the maternal than the American or Western European tradition. Rather than a human mother who deserves appreciation on a designated day, Pachamama is a cosmic figure who sustains all life and to whom all life owes an ongoing debt of gratitude and reciprocity. The ritual practices associated with Pachamama are not occasional (once a year, on the second Sunday of May) but continuous — an ongoing acknowledgment that human life is supported by and embedded in a larger maternal reality.
8.4 Yemanjá and the African Diaspora Tradition
In the Candomblé and Umbanda traditions of Brazil, in the Yoruba tradition of West Africa, in the Santería tradition of Cuba and the Caribbean, the orisha Yemanjá (also spelled Iemanjá, Yemaya, and various other ways) is the goddess of the ocean, of the moon, and of motherhood. She is one of the most widely venerated figures in the African diaspora religious traditions, and her festival — celebrated on February 2nd in Brazil, where hundreds of thousands of devotees gather on beaches to offer gifts of flowers, food, and candles to the sea — is one of the most spectacular expressions of maternal symbolism in the contemporary world.
Yemanjá’s association with the ocean reflects the African tradition of understanding the sea as the body of the primordial mother — the source from which all life originally emerged, the vast, sustaining, and sometimes devouring presence that surrounds and supports the land. Her symbols include the color blue and white (the colors of the sea and the sky), the crescent moon, fish and other sea creatures, mirrors (she is associated with vanity and with the seeing of hidden truths), and white flowers, particularly water lilies.
The offerings made to Yemanjá at her festival — flowers, perfume, combs, mirrors, miniature boats — are given to the sea (her body) with prayers for protection, fertility, and good fortune. The image of hundreds of thousands of people wading into the surf to lay offerings on the water, of flowers and candles floating out to sea on the outgoing tide, is one of the most powerful ritual enactments of maternal symbolism in the contemporary world — and it involves none of the commercial paraphernalia that Anna Jarvis so despised.
Part Nine: Cards, Gifts, and the Language of Insufficient Objects
9.1 The Greeting Card: A Technology of Sentiment
The greeting card is the most universally purchased Mother’s Day gift in the United States, which makes it also the most universally inadequate one. Anna Jarvis’s critique — that a greeting card is “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write” — gets at something real: the pre-printed card is a gesture of sentiment without the labor of sentiment, a way of expressing feeling through a purchased object rather than through the vulnerable act of finding one’s own words.
And yet the greeting card persists, and its persistence says something interesting about the symbolic function it serves. The greeting card is not, in its actual use, typically given instead of a personal expression of feeling; it is given alongside one, as a frame for personal inscription. The space at the bottom of the card, where the giver writes a message in their own handwriting, is where the personal enters an otherwise generic object. The card’s pre-printed sentiment provides a scaffold — it says what you want to say in more polished form than you might manage on your own, and then you add the personal detail, the specific memory, the handwritten declaration that makes it yours.
The visual symbolism of greeting cards has its own elaborate vocabulary. The flowers (almost always soft in color, almost always slightly stylized rather than botanically precise), the butterflies, the hearts, the scripts that curve and flourish in ways that suggest elegance and emotion — all of these are visual signifiers in a commercial language of sentimentality that has been refined over more than a century of greeting card production. Each element has been tested and selected for its ability to trigger the desired emotional response: warmth, tenderness, gratitude, love.
The most successful Mother’s Day cards are those that navigate successfully between the generic and the specific — that feel personal without requiring the sender to have done anything particularly personal, that create the sensation of intimacy without demanding too much from either party. This is a remarkable achievement, and the fact that it can be achieved at all says something interesting about the relationship between symbols and feelings: sometimes a well-chosen symbol does more work than an individually constructed statement.
9.2 Jewelry: The Permanent Gift
If flowers are the ephemeral Mother’s Day gift (beautiful, fragrant, gone in a week), jewelry is the permanent one — the gift that endures, that the mother will wear on ordinary days throughout the year, that will eventually be passed down. The symbolic vocabulary of Mother’s Day jewelry is extensive.
Birthstone jewelry: the practice of giving mothers jewelry featuring the birthstones of her children is one of the most personal forms of Mother’s Day symbolism. Each birthstone carries its own ancient symbolic meanings — the diamond (April) for strength and invincibility, the ruby (July) for passion and protection, the sapphire (September) for wisdom and loyalty, the opal (October) for hope and creativity — but in the context of a Mother’s Day gift, these meanings are overlaid by the more immediate personal meaning: this stone represents this child, this particular beloved person.
Lockets: the locket, which opens to reveal a small photograph or other keepsake, is one of the most specifically maternal pieces of jewelry in the Western tradition. It holds the image of the beloved close to the heart — literally, since most lockets are worn on chains of heart-appropriate length. The locket is a technology of memory and devotion, a way of carrying the loved one with you even in absence. The Victorian tradition of giving lockets containing locks of hair (a more intimate and biologically charged form of portable memory) has largely faded, but the locket’s emotional logic remains.
Charm bracelets: the charm bracelet, on which small symbolic objects are accumulated over time (one charm per occasion, each charm representing a particular memory or milestone), creates a wearable autobiography — a bracelet that tells the story of a relationship through its accumulated symbols. The individual charms in a Mother’s Day charm bracelet might include a heart (love), a house (home), the initials of children, birthstones, a figure that represents a shared experience or interest. The bracelet as a whole becomes a portable narrative of the relationship between mother and children.
The “mother” necklace: a category of jewelry explicitly marketed for Mother’s Day that features the word “mother” itself, or “mom,” in script — often accompanied by a heart or a birthstone. These pieces are among the most direct in their symbolism: they name the relationship rather than representing it through metaphor. The mother who wears such a necklace is wearing her identity as a mother as an explicit declaration, a statement of who she is and what she values.
9.3 Food as Symbolic Gift
The tradition of taking mothers to brunch or giving them food as a Mother’s Day gift is one of the most symbolically rich aspects of the holiday, and also one of the most frequently misunderstood. Food is, in virtually every human culture, one of the primary languages of love — we feed those we love, we prepare food as a form of care, we share meals as a way of sharing life.
When Mother’s Day takes the form of a meal — whether it’s the family gathered at a restaurant for brunch, or the children (with or without adult assistance) attempting to produce breakfast in bed — the symbolic content is a temporary inversion of the normal order. For one day, the person who usually feeds is herself fed; the one who usually serves is served; the one who usually attends to others is attended to. This inversion is a form of symbolic recognition — an acknowledgment of the care that the mother ordinarily provides by providing something like that care in return, if only for a morning.
The specific foods associated with Mother’s Day in American culture tend toward the brunch register: eggs benedict, mimosas, pancakes shaped like flowers or hearts (the latter being the kind of symbolic gesture that children make naturally and without instruction, understanding instinctively that form carries meaning). These are not foods that communicate anything specific about the relationship between this mother and these children; they are generic festive foods that signal “celebration” and “special occasion” in the culinary vocabulary of American culture.
More interesting, symbolically, are the cases in which Mother’s Day food is specifically chosen or prepared to reflect the individual mother’s preferences or history — the Filipino mother whose family makes the specific adobo recipe she grew up eating, the grandmother whose birthday cake was always a particular kind of buttercream layer cake and whose descendants make it again on Mother’s Day. In these cases, food becomes a more specific symbolic language, a way of honoring not “mothers in general” but this particular mother, in her specificity.
Part Ten: Contested Meanings — The Politics of Maternal Symbolism
10.1 The Feminist Critique
The symbolism of Mother’s Day has been a site of feminist critique since at least the 1960s, and the critique has only become more sophisticated as the field of feminist theory has developed. The basic argument is not difficult to state: the holiday’s symbolic vocabulary — the soft colors, the floral imagery, the domestic scenes, the emphasis on nurturing and self-sacrifice — encodes and reinforces a set of assumptions about what mothers are and should be that serves patriarchal interests at the expense of women’s autonomy and equality.
The “good mother” as constructed in the symbolic vocabulary of Mother’s Day is patient, selfless, warm, and endlessly available. She finds her deepest satisfaction in the service of others. She does not resent the labor she performs; she performs it with love, which is precisely what distinguishes maternal care from the kind of care that would demand compensation. The symbol system of Mother’s Day celebrates this figure — and in celebrating her, it implicitly censures the mother who is angry, the mother who is resentful, the mother who wants more than maternal service, the mother who is anything other than joyfully selfless.
Betty Friedan’s analysis in “The Feminine Mystique” (1963) is relevant here: the mystique of femininity that she identified as trapping educated women in domestic roles was reinforced precisely by the kind of cultural celebration that Mother’s Day embodies — a celebration that honors the mother’s domestic labor while keeping intact the social arrangements that require her to perform it.
More recent feminist scholars have noted the way in which Mother’s Day symbolism tends to erase certain kinds of mothers: the mother who placed her child for adoption, the mother whose children have died, the woman who chose not to become a mother, the transgender woman who is a mother, the gay or lesbian couple in which both parents are mothers. The holiday’s symbolic vocabulary is built around a normative image of the mother that excludes many actual mothers and many actual experiences of maternal love.
10.2 The Holiday’s Racial Dimensions
The symbolism of Mother’s Day in American culture has been, from the beginning, shaped by assumptions about race that are often invisible to the white observers who most clearly match the holiday’s normative image. The “good mother” of Mother’s Day symbolism has historically been implicitly white — the figure in the advertisements, on the greeting cards, in the Norman Rockwell paintings that helped establish the holiday’s visual vocabulary has been, by default, white.
This invisibility matters for several reasons. First, it makes the holiday’s stated universalism — its claim to honor all mothers — false; the symbolic vocabulary of the holiday does not actually represent all mothers, and the mothers who are outside the norm are aware of this. Second, it erases the specific history of Black motherhood in America — a history that includes the particular violence of slavery, which systematically destroyed Black family structures by separating mothers from children, and the ongoing violence of systemic racism, which continues to place Black mothers and Black children in specific danger.
The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century had its own powerful symbolic vocabulary of motherhood — the image of the enslaved mother being separated from her child was one of the most potent anti-slavery images in circulation, used by figures from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Beecher Stowe to argue for the abolition of the system that made such separations routine. The fact that this history is not part of the official symbolic vocabulary of Mother’s Day — that the holiday’s images do not reflect this dimension of the maternal experience in American history — is itself a political statement about whose motherhood the holiday is designed to honor.
10.3 The Childless and the Grieving
Mother’s Day is, for many people, among the most painful days of the year — and the holiday’s triumphalist symbolic vocabulary does not make space for this pain. The woman who has experienced infertility, the woman who has suffered a miscarriage, the woman who has lost a child, the woman who was adopted and has complicated feelings about her birth mother — for all of these people, the relentless cheerfulness of the holiday’s symbolic register can feel like a form of cruelty.
There is a growing movement to acknowledge these experiences within the holiday’s symbolic vocabulary. Some churches and communities observe a “Difficult Mother’s Day” service — a space in which those for whom the holiday is painful can bring their complicated feelings rather than suppressing them in the presence of the dominant festive narrative. Grief counselors have noted that Mother’s Day is one of the days on which their services are most needed, and the increasing public acknowledgment of pregnancy loss and infant death has begun to create space for memorial practices within the holiday.
The white carnation’s memorial function — the white flower for the mother who has died — is one of the few elements of the official Mother’s Day symbolism that already makes space for grief. But the grief of the mother who has lost a child, or the grief of the adult who has lost their mother and must navigate the holiday in the absence of her physical presence, has historically been poorly served by the holiday’s symbolic vocabulary.
The phrase “angel baby” — used to refer to a child who has died — and the associated symbols (angel wings, stars, the color blue or gold used to represent a child’s presence in death) represent an attempt to create a symbolic vocabulary for this specific grief within the cultural space of Mother’s Day. These are relatively new symbols, still in the process of being established, and their presence alongside the carnations and roses and pink hearts represents an expansion of the holiday’s symbolic register to include experiences that the original vocabulary excluded.
Part Eleven: Sacred Mothers — The Divine Maternal in World Religion
11.1 Quan Yin and the Buddhist Tradition
In Buddhist and Taoist traditions, particularly in East Asian forms of Buddhism, the figure of Quan Yin (also Guanyin, Kannon, Kwan Yin) occupies a role analogous to that of the Virgin Mary in Catholic Christianity — the divine feminine in her aspect of compassion and mercy, the cosmic mother who responds to the suffering of all beings.
Quan Yin’s name means “the one who perceives the sounds of the world” — specifically, the sounds of suffering, the cries of those who are in pain or danger. She is the bodhisattva of compassion, a being who has achieved the capacity for enlightenment but who chooses to remain accessible to suffering beings rather than passing into nirvana. In this sense, she embodies a specifically maternal form of compassion: the love that chooses to remain present in the world of suffering rather than withdrawing into peace.
The symbols associated with Quan Yin include:
The white robe: like the Virgin Mary, Quan Yin is often depicted in white, a color associated with purity and spiritual elevation. But Quan Yin’s whiteness also suggests the lotus — the white lotus that grows from muddy waters, the symbol of enlightenment emerging from the conditions of suffering.
The lotus: the lotus is the primary symbol of Quan Yin’s spiritual status. It grows from mud (the world of suffering and illusion), rises through water (the process of spiritual practice), and blooms in sunlight above the water’s surface (enlightenment). Quan Yin is often shown standing or sitting on a lotus, holding a lotus, or emerging from a lotus — all ways of symbolizing her relationship to the spiritual path and to the possibility of transformation.
The willow branch and vase: Quan Yin is often shown holding a willow branch (a symbol of flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to withstand storms without breaking) and a vase containing the “dew of compassion” (water that has the power to heal and transform). With these instruments, she sprinkles compassion on suffering beings, gently bending toward them in their need as a willow bends toward the water.
The child: in some traditions, Quan Yin is depicted holding or accompanied by a child — an image that resonates with the broader tradition of the divine mother and child, and that emphasizes her role as a protector and provider of life.
11.2 The Black Madonna
Among the most powerful and mysterious images in Western religious art is the Black Madonna — the figure of the Virgin Mary depicted with dark or black skin, a tradition that appears in religious sites across Europe (particularly in France, Spain, Poland, and Switzerland), Latin America, and elsewhere.
The origins of the Black Madonna are disputed and complex. Some Black Madonnas are dark because of the materials used (certain woods or oils darken over time), others because of soot from centuries of candles. But many are intentionally black, and the symbolic significance of their blackness has been interpreted in many ways.
One interpretation connects the Black Madonna to the pre-Christian goddess traditions that Christianity absorbed — specifically, to the dark earth goddesses (Isis in her aspect as the dark moon, Cybele, the black stone of Mecca that may preserve a memory of an ancient Arabian mother goddess) whose ancient power was too great to suppress and so was instead incorporated into the Christian tradition under the name of Mary.
Another interpretation connects the Black Madonna to the biblical Song of Solomon: “I am black, but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem.” In this reading, the Black Madonna’s blackness is a sign of beauty and dignity, a challenge to the equation of whiteness with purity and goodness that pervades much of Western religious art.
A third interpretation, particularly developed in the context of liberation theology in Latin America, sees the Black Madonna as a figure of solidarity with the poor and marginalized — a divine mother whose dark skin marks her as belonging to the oppressed rather than the oppressors, who stands with those who suffer rather than with those who cause suffering.
Whatever the interpretation, the Black Madonna represents a significant counterpoint to the dominant symbolic vocabulary of the idealized mother in Western culture — a figure who disrupts the equation of the maternal with the white, the pale, the pure, and insists on the presence of darkness, mystery, and ancient power at the heart of the maternal archetype.
11.3 The Mother in Islam
The Islamic tradition has a complex and rich symbolic vocabulary around the figure of the mother, though it lacks the iconographic tradition of Marian imagery that characterizes Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. The Quran and hadith literature attribute enormous dignity and importance to the role of the mother, most famously in the hadith in which a man asks the Prophet Muhammad: “Who is most deserving of my good company?” The Prophet replies: “Your mother.” The man asks again: “And then who?” “Your mother.” And again: “And then who?” “Your mother.” And only on the fourth asking: “Your father.”
This hadith — which is among the most frequently cited in Islamic discussions of family ethics — establishes the mother as the primary object of filial devotion, three times over. It is a statement about the specific weight of maternal labor — the labor of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing that makes motherhood physically demanding in ways that paternity is not — and about the proportionate gratitude that children owe in recognition of that labor.
The symbolic vocabulary of Islamic maternal devotion tends to be textual and behavioral rather than visual (in keeping with the Islamic tradition’s general caution about figurative art), but it is no less powerful for that. The mother’s prayers for her children are understood as particularly potent; the honor due to the mother is explicitly ranked above the honor due to the father; the phrase “heaven lies under the feet of the mother” — a hadith of contested authenticity but wide circulation — encapsulates the symbolic status of the maternal in Islamic ethical culture.
Part Twelve: The Evolving Symbol System
12.1 Mother’s Day in the Age of Social Media
The arrival of social media has transformed the symbolic vocabulary of Mother’s Day in ways that are still being worked out. Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms have created a new space for the public performance of maternal devotion — a space in which the private sentiments of the holiday are made public in ways that would have been unimaginable to Anna Jarvis.
The “tribute post” — the photograph of a mother, typically captioned with a personal statement of love and gratitude — has become one of the dominant forms of Mother’s Day expression in the social media age. These posts perform several symbolic functions simultaneously: they express genuine feeling, they construct a public version of the relationship between child and mother, they create a record that persists beyond the occasion, and they situate the poster within a broader community of people engaged in the same symbolic act.
The symbolic vocabulary of these posts is interesting: the photographs chosen tend to emphasize particular moments and qualities (the mother laughing, the mother holding a child, the mother in a moment of unguarded happiness), the captions tend to emphasize particular values (strength, selflessness, unconditional love), and the overall effect is the construction of an idealized maternal image that is simultaneously specific (this particular mother) and generic (the qualities attributed to her are the same ones attributed to all idealized mothers).
Social media has also created new spaces for the expression of the painful dimensions of Mother’s Day that the holiday’s official symbolism tends to suppress. The Instagram post acknowledging a difficult relationship with a mother, the Twitter thread about navigating the holiday after a mother’s death, the Facebook status marking a pregnancy loss — these represent the expansion of the holiday’s symbolic vocabulary to include experiences of grief, ambivalence, and complexity that the carnations and brunch reservations don’t easily accommodate.
12.2 New Mothers, New Symbols
The expanding definition of “mother” in contemporary culture has created pressure on the holiday’s symbolic vocabulary that is slowly but perceptibly changing it. The rise of same-sex parenthood, of adoption, of single parenthood, of surrogacy, of step-parenthood, of chosen family configurations — all of these create forms of maternal relationship that the holiday’s traditional symbolic vocabulary was not designed to honor.
In response, greeting card companies have expanded their ranges. “Mom and Mom” cards now exist alongside “Mom and Dad” cards; “Mother figure” and “like a mom to me” cards acknowledge relationships that don’t fit the biological nuclear family structure; cards addressed to fathers who are primary caregivers, to grandmothers who have become de facto mothers, to older siblings who have stepped into maternal roles — all of these represent an expansion of the symbolic vocabulary of Mother’s Day to reflect the actual diversity of maternal relationships.
The symbol system is also changing to accommodate shifting understandings of gender. The pink-and-flowers aesthetic of traditional Mother’s Day symbolism has been supplemented — though not yet replaced — by more diverse visual vocabularies that don’t encode femininity so rigidly. “Strong mom” imagery, in which mothers are shown as powerful, active, and capable rather than soft and gentle, has become more common. The image of the mother in the sports jersey, coaching her child’s team; the mother in the business suit, both successful and devoted; the mother in the hiking gear, adventurous and resilient — these are attempts to expand the symbolic representation of motherhood beyond the domestic and the sentimental.
12.3 Environmental Motherhood: Pachamama in the Anthropocene
Perhaps the most significant expansion of the symbolic vocabulary of motherhood in recent decades has been the revival and popularization of Earth Mother imagery in the context of the climate crisis. The concept of “Mother Earth” — ancient in virtually every culture, largely submerged in the dominant Western tradition in favor of the view of nature as a resource to be exploited — has returned to cultural prominence in the twenty-first century as the consequences of that exploitation have become unmistakable.
The use of maternal symbolism in environmental advocacy is both politically powerful and symbolically complex. When activists speak of “our Mother Earth” or “protecting Mother Nature,” they are invoking a symbolic tradition that is genuinely ancient — the equation of the earth with a maternal body, the understanding of ecological destruction as a form of violence against the maternal — while also, inevitably, deploying the gendered associations of the maternal (vulnerability, the need for protection, the suffering of those who give life and are not honored for it) in ways that can be both empowering and limiting.
The equation of the earth with a mother — and specifically with a suffering, endangered mother — can be a powerful political tool, because it activates the protective instinct that human beings feel toward mothers and toward the maternal. But it can also reinforce the association of femininity with passivity and victimhood, suggesting that the earth (like the idealized mother) suffers and needs to be protected rather than being a powerful agent in its own right.
The figure of Pachamama — the Andean earth mother whose indigenous symbolic vocabulary has been increasingly adopted by the global environmental movement — offers a somewhat different model: a maternal figure who is not passive or vulnerable but actively powerful, whose generosity is not a form of weakness but of strength, whose suffering at human hands is not a call for protection but a call for reciprocity and justice.
Part Thirteen: The Symbolism of Absence
13.1 The Empty Chair
Among the most powerful symbols in the Mother’s Day landscape is one that the holiday’s official vocabulary rarely addresses directly: the empty chair. The empty chair at the brunch table, the place setting that is not occupied, the absence that makes itself felt in the midst of celebration — for many people, Mother’s Day is organized not around the presence of the mother but around the awareness of her absence.
The empty chair has a long history as a symbol of loss and mourning. In the Western tradition, it appears at the Last Supper (Judas’s empty place), in the folklore of the séance (the chair kept empty for the departed spirit), and in the contemporary tradition of POW/MIA observances (the “Battlefield Cross” and the table set with one empty place for those who have not returned from war). Its symbolic power lies in its suggestion of a presence that persists despite physical absence — the chair is empty, but the person’s place at the table has not been abandoned.
For those who have lost their mothers, Mother’s Day involves a constant negotiation between the cultural pressure to celebrate and the personal reality of grief. The holiday’s official symbolism offers little guidance for this negotiation — it is designed for the living relationship, not the posthumous one. The white carnation is the only official symbol for this experience, and it is, for many people, insufficient.
13.2 When the Mother Was Not Safe
Not every child’s relationship with their mother is one of love and safety. The holiday’s assumption of maternal warmth and protection is, for some people, a source not of comfort but of pain — a reminder of what was absent rather than what was present.
The symbolic vocabulary of Mother’s Day has no official language for the complicated experience of having had a mother who was dangerous, absent, addicted, violent, or otherwise unable to provide the care that the holiday assumes as given. The cultural pressure to perform gratitude and love on this day — to participate in the symbolic rituals of the holiday even when those rituals don’t match one’s experience — can be a form of violence for those whose maternal experience was not what the carnations and pink hearts suggest.
This is one of the dimensions of Mother’s Day symbolism that is most in need of expansion. The growing discourse around childhood trauma, family dysfunction, and the complex psychology of mother-child relationships has created a cultural language for experiences that the holiday’s symbolism still largely refuses to acknowledge. The symbol system is slowly expanding — greeting cards that acknowledge complicated feelings, social media spaces where people can speak honestly about difficult maternal relationships, therapeutic frameworks that don’t require idealization of the mother — but the dominant symbolic vocabulary of the holiday continues to enforce a particular vision of maternal love that many people’s actual experiences contradict.
Part Fourteen: Making Meaning — The Personal and the Symbolic
14.1 When the Generic Becomes Specific
All of the analysis in the foregoing pages risks suggesting that the symbolic vocabulary of Mother’s Day is a system imposed from outside — by greeting card companies, by florists, by the machinery of commercial culture — onto the genuine feelings that people have for their mothers. This is partially true, but it is also partially wrong.
Symbols become meaningful through use. The carnation that Anna Jarvis chose because it was her mother’s favorite flower became a public symbol, yes — and in becoming a public symbol, it lost the specificity of its origin, becoming “Mother’s Day flower” rather than “Ann Reeves Jarvis’s favorite flower.” But when someone today buys carnations for their mother, they are not only participating in a generic commercial ritual; they are also potentially doing something specific and personal, something that the symbol mediates but does not determine.
The pink roses that a child selects from a supermarket bucket, choosing the ones that look most beautiful, most appropriate, most likely to please — those roses carry, in that moment of selection, a layer of personal meaning that the commercial context does not eliminate. The card that a person spends twenty minutes at the rack trying to find — not the first card, not the cheapest card, but the one that says something closest to what they actually feel — that card, however generic, has been given specificity by the effort of choosing.
This is what symbols do: they provide a vocabulary for feelings that are difficult to express directly, and the use of that vocabulary in specific, personal contexts gives the symbols a life that their generic form doesn’t fully contain. The mother who receives carnations knows, or at least hopes, that the carnations mean something — not just “it’s Mother’s Day” but “I was thinking of you, I wanted to give you something, I chose these because I know you like flowers.”
14.2 Inventing New Symbols
The most powerful acts of Mother’s Day symbolism are often the most private and least commercially mediated: the child who makes something by hand, who draws a picture or writes a poem or makes a construction paper card that is aesthetically imperfect but symbolically saturated with personal meaning; the adult who chooses to mark the holiday in a way that reflects something specific about their relationship with their mother rather than reproducing generic gestures.
These acts of personal symbolic invention operate according to the same logic as the larger symbol systems we have been examining — they create meaning through association, through the deliberate linking of an object or gesture with an intention or feeling — but they are not constrained by the commercial vocabulary. The meaning of a hand-drawn card is not determined by any external authority; it is made entirely in the relationship between the maker and the recipient.
This capacity for personal symbolic invention is, perhaps, what Anna Jarvis was really trying to protect when she raged against the commercialization of her holiday. Not the carnation specifically — though the carnation mattered to her for personal reasons — but the principle that the symbols used to express love and gratitude should be chosen by the person who feels those things, not produced by the millions to catch the eye of the distracted consumer. She understood that a mass-produced symbol is a different kind of thing from a personally chosen one — not necessarily less beautiful or effective, but necessarily less specific, less accountable to the particular relationship it is meant to honor.
14.3 The Symbol and the Thing It Cannot Say
All symbols, ultimately, face the same limitation: they are not the thing they represent. The carnation is not the love; the card is not the feeling; the brunch is not the relationship. This is not a failing of symbols — it is their nature. Symbols work precisely because they are not the thing itself; they are a representation, a stand-in, a way of making visible what would otherwise be invisible.
The persistent inadequacy of Mother’s Day gifts — the sense that nothing is quite right, quite enough, quite equal to the occasion — is a symptom of this fundamental symbolic condition. The occasion is a relationship of extraordinary complexity and depth; the gifts available to mark it are necessarily partial, generic, insufficient. No flower, no matter how beautiful; no card, no matter how carefully chosen; no brunch, no matter how lovingly prepared — none of these can fully say what the holiday is attempting to say.
And perhaps that is appropriate. Perhaps the inadequacy of the symbol is part of its meaning — a way of acknowledging that what is being honored is too large for any single gesture to contain, that the appropriate response to a relationship of such depth and complexity is not satisfaction but something closer to the recognition of how much remains unexpressed.
Anna Jarvis, standing at her mother’s grave in 1905, understood this. She organized her grief into a campaign, her campaign into a holiday, her holiday into a symbol — the white carnation pinned to a lapel — and then spent the rest of her life watching the symbol escape her intentions, becoming something she never wanted, serving purposes she despised. The symbol lived its own life, accumulated its own meanings, served its own cultural functions.
This is what symbols do. They exceed their origins. They outlive the intentions of those who deploy them. They carry within them meanings that their originators did not intend and cannot control. The carnation Anna Jarvis sent to a church in West Virginia in 1908 is now part of the symbolic vocabulary of a holiday observed by billions of people around the world, in forms she would not recognize, for purposes she might not endorse.
And yet — every year, in the supermarkets and flower shops and online delivery services, someone chooses a carnation for their mother. White, perhaps, if the mother has died. Pink or red if she is living. The specific meaning that Anna Jarvis intended has been forgotten by most of the people making this choice. But the gesture persists, and in persisting it continues to do the work that all symbols do: it makes visible an invisible thing, it marks the importance of a relationship, it says — however inadequately, however generically, however far from the words that would actually be needed — I was here. You matter. I have not forgotten.
The Symbol That Is Never Finished
There is a carnation in a vase on a table somewhere, right now, on the eve of the second Sunday of May. It is white or pink or red. It is beginning to open — or it has been open for two days and the edges of its petals are starting to soften, to curl slightly inward in the way that cut flowers do as they near the end of their brief, beautiful tenure in the air.
Someone chose that carnation — or the rose beside it, or the peony in the other vase, or the sunflower that was supposed to be cheerful and is, it turns out, cheerful. Someone chose those flowers and brought them home and found a vase and filled the vase with water and arranged the flowers in it with varying degrees of skill and intention. And those flowers now sit in a room, on a table, in a home, waiting to be received as evidence of something — love, gratitude, the awareness of debt, the acknowledgment of a relationship that is larger than any gesture that could be made in its honor.
The symbolism of Mother’s Day is, in the end, a technology of feeling — a set of tools that human cultures have developed, over thousands of years, for the purpose of making visible the invisible. The flowers and the colors and the hearts and the cards are not the love; they are the love’s representative, its stand-in, the imperfect ambassador of a feeling that exceeds all representation.
This imperfection is not a failure. It is the condition of all symbolism, all language, all human attempts to communicate what we feel in our deepest selves. We reach for the carnation because we cannot say what we mean. We choose the pink one, or the white one, or the red one, and we hand it over, and the person who receives it understands — not perfectly, not completely, not in a way that fully captures what we intended — but well enough. Well enough to know that they have been thought of. Well enough to know that this day, and what it represents, has not been forgotten.
The symbol is never finished. It continues to accrue meanings, to expand and contract and shift as the cultures that use it change. The carnation that Anna Jarvis sent to a church in West Virginia in 1908 is the same flower that sits on that table, and it is also a completely different flower — one that has passed through a century of use and transformation and commercial exploitation and feminist critique and cultural expansion, and has arrived in the present carrying all of that history within it, available to those who know how to look.
Most people, handing over the carnation, are not thinking about Ann Reeves Jarvis or the Victorian language of flowers or the ancient worship of Rhea or the feminist critique of domestic symbolism. They are thinking, more or less, of the person in front of them — the specific, irreplaceable person whose existence in the world is the occasion for all of this symbol-making, all of this reaching toward the inadequate and the imperfect and the beautiful.
And that, perhaps, is the most important symbol of all: not the carnation or the rose or the heart or the quilt or the locket or any of the material objects that the holiday has assembled over its century of existence, but the act of choosing, the act of trying, the act of standing in the flower section of a supermarket and reaching, with more love than skill, toward something that might — might — be equal to the occasion.
It never quite is. It never quite can be. And the reaching is everything.
The history of Mother’s Day symbolism is also the history of human beings trying to say the unsayable — to give form to feelings that exceed all form. The carnation wilts. The card yellows. The brunch ends. The feeling, if it is genuine, does not.
0 responses to “The Meaning Beneath the Flowers: A Complete Guide to Mother’s Day Symbolism”