The religious followers of the Reverend Mary Baker Eddy simply called her Mother. The church she built in Boston was sometimes referred to as “Mother’s church.” Today it is informally called The Mother Church.
Ironically, Eddy had little experience as a mother in her own life. After her first husband died of illness, she gave birth to a son, but he was sent away to the 19th-century equivalent of foster care, due in part to her chronic illness and lack of a husband. When he became an adult mother and son reconnected, but circumstances always prevented the two from having the normal family relationship they both wanted. Eddy also adopted a son — an adult man — hoping to have a family life, but after a few years he drifted away.
Nevertheless, Eddy’s close religious followers consistently found her to have such an endearing motherly quality that the title Mother was natural. The first of her students to request permission to call her Mother gave her this poem as a gift in the early 1870s :
O, mother mine, God grant I ne’er forget,
Whatever be my grief or what my joy,
The unmeasured, unextinguishable debt
I owe to thee, but find my sweet employ
Ever through thy remaining days to be
To thee as faithful as thou wast to me
A fitting and universal sentiment for Mother’s Day!