Mother’s Day has been a national holiday for 110 years, but its roots go back even further, and shows the role mothers play in healing.

On May 8, 1914, Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis had spent nearly a decade promoting the idea of a day to celebrate motherhood, inspired by her own mother, Ann.

Ann Jarvis had been part of a committee formed in 1868 with the goal of creating a day to celebrate mothers as a way to reconnect families that had been divided by the U.S. Civil War. She worked with Julia Ward Howe, who in 1870 wrote what’s become known as the Mother’s Day Proclamation, calling on women to reject war and violence.

The first Mother’s Day celebration, organized by Anna Jarvis in 1908, was to honor the work of her mother in particular and of mother’s in general.

For Ann Jarvis, for Howe and for tens of thousands of other women, the horror of the Civil War had not just been the killing, but the fact that many families had lost sons on both sides, leaving lasting pain and unresolved conflicts.

Anna Jarvis eventually became disillusioned with the holiday she’d been so essential in creating, saying the commercialization of the day had ruined the original sentiment of families celebrating their mothers in individual ways.

There’s no need to list the many things dividing our nation and our world right now. And many of those divisions are affecting families, as well, in ways large and small.

Mother’s Day is a chance for each of us to reflect on what our mothers have given us, the lessons they have taught us and the legacies they have left us.

This year, part of that legacy can be a return to the origins of Mother’s Day: Healing divisions.

— JK