As we today celebrate motherhood, let us pause briefly to remember the mother of Mother's Day, a woman of fierce loyalty and tireless enterprise and a total raving lunatic.

Childless herself, schoolteacher Anna Jarvis was consumed by twin obsessions that tore her apart: first, a relentless effort to establish a perpetual tribute to her dead mother, and later, an equally tenacious drive to destroy the monument she had created.

Jarvis' attachment to her mother was reminiscent of a barnacle. When Mother Jarvis died in 1905, Anna's mission began. It started in her West Virginia hometown with a memorial service she organized on the second anniversary of her mother's death, buying 500 white carnations, her mother's favorite flower, one for each mother in her church's congregation.

She began to lobby for a national holiday in her mother's honor, browbeating politicians, pestering bureaucrats, generally making a nuisance of herself. It worked. Mother's Day became a popular cause. Americans' loyalties may have been deeply divided in those prewar days, but everyone had a mother.

It all culminated with a joint resolution in Congress, signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, establishing the second Sunday in May as a national holiday.

But Anna Jarvis wasn't finished. She had barely begun. Quitting her job, she spent all her time writing foreign heads of state hoping to establish Mother's Day abroad. Her home became so cluttered with correspondence and mementos that she purchased the house next door and filled that up too.

Then it started getting ugly. Mother's Day was becoming a crassly commercial bonanza for florists, card shops and candy-makers. Jarvis lost it. She railed first against the vile floral profiteers making a killing off her mother's beloved carnations.

One of her press releases read: "WHAT WILL YOU DO to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?"

In 1930s, when the United States postmaster announced a Mother's Day commemorative stamp bearing the portrait of Whistler's Mother, Jarvis went ballistic. Whistler's Mother! They had the wrong mother on their stamp!

Jarvis demanded an audience with President Franklin Roosevelt and succeeded in having "Mother's Day" removed from the issues. The stamp was still embellished, however, with a vase of white carnations, which galled her no end. More profit for the profiteers.

About the same time, she stormed into a meeting of the American War Mothers and tried to break up their sale of white carnations for Mother's Day. The police had to drag her out, kicking and screaming.

Soon, she was seen wandering the streets, showing strangers old photos of her taken at the time of her mother's death.

Eventually, Jarvis shut herself away in her dilapidated house and hung a sign in her window that said "Warning, stay away." She would sit for hours next to the radio, ear cocked, certain her mother was trying to communicate with her through the radio waves.

In the end, she was sent to a sanitarium, penniless, babbling, supported by contributions from the hated Florists Exchange. She died at 84, never having been told where the money was coming from.