Mostly we resent these nagging demands.

We're busy. We'll get to it. For years I developed a deep hatred of Hallmark for promoting a holiday of display and sentimentality that we convince ourselves is artificial.

Mother-worship officially went out of fashion once people stopped praying to the goddess Juno even before the fall of Rome, though the sentiment in Christendom was largely transferred to the Virgin Mary. But the modern tradition of Mother's Day, I'm happy to reveal, begins not with an advertising agency but an anti-war activist.

Julia Ward Howe is best known to Americans as the author of the lyrics for the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic', a popular tune on the Union side of the US Civil War. Its bloody lyrics invoking divine justice to punish slavery makes 'Amhr�n na bhFiann' look like a Sunday school ditty for fair-weather Fianna. But after the horrors of that war and the carnage of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870 Howe wrote the 'Mother's Day Proclamation', a call for women to come together, "from the bosom of this devastated Earth", to demand disarmament and peace.

"Irrelevant agencies" making war, she wrote, should be resisted:

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

A little more tough love than the sentimentality that you'll see much of in cards delivered today. There's guilt and then there's Guilt, after all. But worth remembering that beneath all the pap and circumstance today pulses a real and vital and urgent demand.

Each day I see my oneyear-old son stretch and change in some new way and as I watch him watching his mother, I am conscious for the first time how absolute that first relationship is. But, as I've also experienced recently, it is a relationship that is bound and limited in time.

The Atlantic lay between me and my mother when she died.

A motor-neuron disease had over the decades robbed her of her ability to walk, her easy smile and finally her ability to breathe.

My father and sister, with assistance from a local state-supported hospice, tended to her in her final months and weeks.

There's guilt, and then there's Guilt.

When I arrived for the funeral I was asked to deliver her eulogy. Despite the struggles she faced she found the time and strength to act as an advocate for others, speaking out for other physically-disabled adults and learning-disabled children. In that sense it was the easiest speech I ever wrote. She left me brilliant material to work with.

She also left me with what I told the people at her funeral was the thing that made her special: the knowledge that your character is forged not at the moment you fall but in your resolve to pick yourself up, even if sometimes that means accepting help. I may have been wrong about that, however. It may be something that every mother, consciously or not, passes on to her children. They wouldn't make it past their first scraped knee otherwise, I suppose.

Like Mother's Day itself, it's an idea that spread too thin and whipped up too cheaply seems as common as today's flowers that next week, like this newspaper, will be found in bins. But maybe despite all its horrible commercial excesses, to mark this day is not so much to ask.

Send the flowers or the card or whatever. But take the time to hug her and tell her you love her.

You won't always have the chance.

There's guilt, and then there's Guilt.