In offering gratitude for the gift of our lives, we celebrate Mother’s Day as it honors all forms of caring and nurturing ourselves and others. Mother’s Day reminds us to express our love and thanks to all of the women who have cared for us, our birth or adoptive mother, our grandmother or teacher or therapist or elder friend who helped us grow up. It also serves to remind us that caring for others is a uniquely valuable skill, one which is not particularly honored or valued in our culture.

When we look at those who devote their lives to caring for others, we see a subculture of healthcare workers, daycare workers, teachers and counselors who are not paid well for their services. And no matter how amazing mothers may be, they are not paid anything for raising the future citizens of our country.

Let us also appreciate that Mother’s Day has its roots in the peace movement.

For more than a century since its inception, Mother’s Day continues to be a day of protest. Historically, women have taken to the streets to call attention to the injustices of war, poverty, inadequate healthcare, child labor, gun violence, and more. These are the fierce, socially engaged underpinnings of Mother’s Day.

So this Mother’s Day, I invite you to honor the mother-figures in your life and also to marvel at the intricate web of caring that holds our world together. Let us honor the work of taking care of each other in recognition of our profound interconnectedness with one another, appreciating and celebrating the deep bonds we all share.

In gratitude for the nurturing and radical power of love, I wish you all a loving and peaceful Mother’s Day.