Between the Lines

I am a mother. But I am also someone who has spent decades watching how power works — and how it fails — and I find myself thinking today not of flowers, but of Julia Ward Howe’s fury.

So this is addressed to you.

You are being asked, again, to bear the cost that others decide. To raise children through years of patience and sacrifice, only to watch them fed into conflicts authored by people who will not themselves bleed. 

The mothers of Ukrainian sons and Russian sons. The mothers in Gaza and in Tel Aviv. The mothers who get the phone call, or who never get any call at all, because there is no one left to make it.

Howe wrote in 1870:

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”

That sentence is not history. It is this morning’s news.

What Howe understood — and what the domestication of her holiday has allowed us to forget — is that motherhood is not just a relationship. It is a position of moral authority, earned through the irreplaceable cost of bringing life into the world and sustaining it. 

That authority was never meant to stop at the front door. It was meant to walk into parliaments, into peace negotiations, into the rooms where wars are decided.

The evidence, incidentally, supports her. Decades of research show that peace agreements are more durable when women help negotiate them. Not because women are inherently gentle — Howe herself was not gentle — but because they bring different accountabilities to the table. They tend to represent the people who actually live in the aftermath.

So today, if you are a mother, I would ask you to accept something more than gratitude. 

Accept the authority that is already yours. Make your voice inconvenient. Demand to be in the room. Find the mothers on the other side of whatever war is being waged in your name, and recognize what you share.

Howe called for women of one country to be “too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

That tenderness, correctly understood, is not weakness. It is the most radical political act available.

Happy Mother’s Day. Now let’s make it mean something.