It's the power of 100-watt love, halogen love, love that bores right through you. It's the power of the she-bear, protecting her cub with razor claws. It's the power of the voice, tender and fierce, that makes a naughty child cringe.

And, on this eve of Mother's Day 2000, it is the power of thousands of those voices, raised in unison, to demand better child care, crime-free neighborhoods, an end to gun violence, educational reform.

"We don't take no for an answer," says U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who campaigned as "The Mom in Tennis Shoes." "If there's a road that needs to be fixed, it's the moms who gather together to go to city council. If there's a playground that needs equipment, it's the moms who work hard to raise the money."

Mothers are having their day, all right, as groups like Mothers Against Violence in America, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Mothers Against Sexual Abuse, Mothers Against Gang Wars, Mothers Against Teen Violence, and Mothers for Police Accountability pound the political pavement to make the world a little safer for children.

	Melissa Chasan (center, with Lisa Gould-Fadale and Richard Russell): "Every day . . . another child being wounded or killed by a gun, and I'm sick of it."Grant M. Haller/P-I

"If you look for anything to get done . . . moms, if they get mad enough, they'll do it," says Melissa Chasan, mother of four and one of the estimated 3,000 to 4,000 women heading downtown for today's Million Mom March for Common-Sense Gun Laws in Seattle.

Chasan is plenty steamed. "Every day I open the newspaper and read about another child being wounded or killed by a gun, and I'm sick of it," she says. "Enough is enough."

Today's event is a prelude to tomorrow's mass Million Mom March in the other Washington, an event sure to put M-power on the political map. The D.C. organizers expect more than 200,000 moms, grandparents, fathers and kids to participate.

Among them will be Lesley Reed and her 3-year-old son.

"Once you're a mother to one child, you're a mother to all children," says the Vashon Island mom, who is attending both marches.

Heat-packing mamas from the Second Amendment Sisters will put on their own display of M-Power tomorrow in Armed Informed Mothers' Marches in D.C. and other cities across the country, including Olympia.

Gun control's a smoking topic, and women wield more than 50 percent of the vote.

"This particular issue rides on the vote of women," says Robin Ball, owner of an indoor shooting range in Spokane and spokeswoman for the Second Amendment Sisters. "It's really critical that women on both sides of the issue get actively involved and get their voices heard."

No doubt the women who started Mother's Day would applaud the timing of this activist upwelling.

The holiday they envisioned had nothing to do with sprays of orchids, champagne brunch, 18-karat gold pendants, chocolate roses or racks of $2 cards.

It had everything to do with M-powerment.

"Arise, then, women of this day!" began Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation in the 1860s.

Reformer Julia Ward Howe envisioned Mother's Day as a time of activism.

Howe, a Boston poet, suffragist and reformer who wrote the lyrics for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," envisioned Mother's Day as a day of activism, a day for women to crusade against the cruelties and injustices of war. "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?" she wrote.

Howe's "earnest day of counsel" was a bit ahead of its time. It wasn't until the early 1900s -- when a Philadelphia teacher named Anna Jarvis began lobbying for a Mother's Day -- that politicians paid heed.

Jarvis' victory, however, would be bittersweet. Her vision was inspired by a ceremony honoring her own mother, a post-Civil War activist intent on healing the scars of the war, who organized moms to aid both Union and Confederate soldiers. Jarvis remembered her mother saying: "I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mother's day. There are many days for men, but none for mothers."

Jarvis' efforts paid off in 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson finally proclaimed Mother's Day an official holiday. But within a few years, a disillusioned Jarvis was decrying the commercialization of "her" holiday, enraged by the marketing of gifts and flowers and cards.

In 1923, Jarvis filed a lawsuit to stop a Mother's Day festival.

"I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit," said the Mother's Day founder, who never became a mother herself and who spent the rest of her days and her money trying to stop the holiday she had started.

An embittered Jarvis died penniless in a sanitarium in 1948. But the celebration she inspired thrived, becoming one of the highest-grossing and most heavily promoted holidays of the year..

"It's become a Hallmark day, or a 1-800-Flowers day," says Pamela Eakes, the Seattle founder of Mothers Against Violence in America. "We're trying to get the message back to the beginning."

	Pamela Eakes, left, of Mothers Against Violence in America (with David Simon, Jenny Weiland): "We cannot tolerate this, how guns are so accessible."P-I file

Like many activist moms, Eakes was pushed to action by a single, senseless act of violence against a child. It was 1993, and a mom with two little girls in the back seat honked at the car in front of her as the driver sat through a green light. A man in the car opened fire, killing one of the girls, a 9-year-old named Loetta Coston.

"That was what launched my thinking of how we cannot tolerate this, how guns are so accessible that a little girl sitting in the back seat of a car can lose her life, says Eakes, who will fly to D.C. tomorrow for the Million Mom March.

The event that prompted Harriett Walden to action was a case of racial profiling. Police followed her son home from a black community festival one night, in search of guns and drugs. "Eleven cars came to the house, and four boys were arrested in my yard," says the founder of Mothers for Police Accountability.

"We decided we needed an organization, because no one was standing up for our kids' rights."

They are now. "It's what mothers do," says Walden.

The tragic event that politicized Ida Ballasiotes was the 1988 murder of her own daughter, stabbed to death by a work-release inmate in Pioneer Square. She is now the state representative for Mercer Island and highly vocal co-chair of the House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee.

"I think people in politics are kind of scared of moms," she says. "There's this instinctive coming together with women. You really don't have to explain things to them because they already understand: Something is either right or it is not.

"And if it has to do with their children, they'll get out there and do what has to be done."

Like Walden said, it's what moms do.

Theirs are the hands that rock the cradle.

Theirs are the hands that rock the boat.

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