It’s Mother’s Day week (Sunday, May 10), which means flowers, brunch reservations, and a guilt-induced rush on greeting cards. But here’s a story I bet you didn’t know. The woman who fought to make Mother’s Day a national holiday spent the rest of her life trying to destroy it.

Her name was Anna Jarvis. In 1908 she organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration to honor her own mom. By 1914 it was a federal holiday. By the 1920s, Hallmark had entered the chat, florists were marking up carnations, and Anna was losing her mind. She called commercial Mother’s Day cards “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.” She was arrested in 1948 protesting a Mother’s Day festival. (Arrested. At a Mother’s Day event. This woman committed to the bit.)

I love her. I love her because she understood something romance readers understand on a cellular level. The feeling matters more than the packaging.

Think about it. Our favorite romance moms aren’t the picture-perfect ones. They’re the complicated ones. The meddlers. The ones who raised the grumpy hero wrong or the ones who saved the heroine’s life a hundred different ways without anyone noticing. The ones who had their own love stories once. The ones who are gone from the page but still shape every choice the protagonist makes.

Found family is the other side of that coin, and we love it for the same reason. Small-town women who adopt the broken ones. The aunties and neighbors and diner owners who show up with casseroles and unasked-for advice. Women who aren’t your mother by blood but would fight a bear for you anyway.

So this Mother’s Day, skip the commercial card if you want. Anna Jarvis would be proud. Call your mom. Tell her what she actually did right. (She might cry. That’s allowed.) Then pour yourself a glass of something and pick up a book where the mother figures aren’t perfect but they’re yours.

If you want to visit a whole town full of those women, I’d start with Aspen Cove. You can grab One Hundred Reasons here. The residents of Aspen Cove know a thing or two about the mothers who show up, blood or not.

Happy Mother’s Day.