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Watch out: Becoming a Mother Changes Everything
by Mary Babic | originally published on Common Dreams May 7, 2005

Here's what I'd like for Mother's Day: No flowers. No candy. Not even a card, however hip and humorous.

Because right now, being a mother feels like the most perilous and primal job I will ever have. And a box of chocolates will do nothing to appease my passion and anger.

When my daughters slammed out of my body years ago, it seemed logical and satisfying - the end result of nine months of eating cheese and spinach, buying diaper genies and tiny sweaters. I was ready for all the changes in my life.

But I wasn't at all prepared for what was about to happen to me.

Nobody warns you about the astounding phenomenon of becoming a mother. Oh, plenty of pundits cover the physical transformations -- the drooping boobs, the spongy abdomen-- and the fiscal implications; and the lifestyle shifts. But nobody, just nobody, lets you in on the dirty secret: mothers are different, and mothering makes you different.
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Her hoop skirt wouldn't fit in today's standard-issue minivan, and still Julia Ward Howe seems to be enjoying a fashionable comeback this Mother's Day.
Howe is best remembered by history buffs as the woman who wrote the words that became "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," the fiery Civil War anthem first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862.
Not so widely known is that eight years later, the woman who wrote "Let us die to make men free" wanted to end war forever. Having seen and survived the violence and economic devastation of the Civil War, Howe dreaded the gathering storm of the Franco-Prussian war. In Boston 1870, she delivered a "Mother's Day Proclamation for Peace," 274 words in which she envisioned "a great and earnest day of counsel" in which mothers of all nationalities would arrive "at the means the great human family can live in peace."
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