Mother's Day is...Not
"Moms make the magic," so give us one day where we don't have to do
In light of Mother’s Day this weekend, which supposedly celebrates the moms of whatever flavor, I’d like—after a consistent run of really word-intensive posts—to declare a writing reprieve for myself where I get to do a pithy, more pictorial post on how dumb this holiday is. Did I say dumb? Well it is, mostly, and I say that in a stomping-off, pouty way since it often hurts my feelings.
Did anyone ask moms about this holiday and what we want? As usual we’re not really factored into that. Mother’s Day became a national event in 1914 declared by President Woodrow Wilson, following campaigning for this led by Anna Jarvis who started memorializing her own mother and honoring the sacrifices moms make in local events. She envisioned this day as a quiet, family holiday with simple gestures of wearing a white carnation and visiting one’s mother, but by the end of Anna’s life, she denounced the holiday that got away from women, co-opted of course by the good ol’ machine of American commercialism.
I don’t want a pharmacy card, or a last-minute bunch of grocery flowers that immediately wilt, or a breakfast made for me that includes the stress of me having to dictate how to cook such a breakfast (should I happen to have purchased the ingredients) and a bonus sink of dirty dishes. I also don’t appreciate in myself the passive-aggressive way the impending expectation of this holiday makes me feel compelled to urge my kids to acknowledge me, giving them hints a week leading up to this that The Day of Finally Appreciating Your Poor Tired Mother is Nigh. And what do I want them to do when as teen/tween now they don’t really have the instinct to appreciate? Nothing! The biggest way to celebrate Mother’s Day would be to make the day different than any other day of the year, and that would be by letting me NOT be a mom that day. Give me the goddamn day off! Let me go it alone, contemplate my midlife in my diary, and read an irrelevant book with no regard of what the biggering rugrats are up to. Don’t make me micro-manage the machinations of yet another holiday that will exhaust and cause agita whichever way it goes.
“Moms make the magic,” writes Alison Stine in Salon.com, so let us not have to plan our own holiday like we do everything else, in her article titled “Mother’s Day is Gaslighting: We celebrate moms for one day a year while doing everything in our power to keep them down at all other times.”
I still hate Mother’s Day. And many other mothers I know do too, in large part because it feels like slapping a smiley sticker on a gaping wound. There is simply a disconnect between the way we talk about mothers in this country and the way we treat them, a gulf too wide to be remedied by a day.
I really tapped into a f-bomb vein via rapid-fire text when I asked my dear friend Dana, also a “writer”/mom/divorcee—which means she doesn’t really have the time to write, about her take on Mother’s Day:
PSA for all kids: Leave your mother alone on Mother’s Day ffs - that’s all we want. Thanks
And/or why do we only get one day in a whole fucking year
Fuck off Hallmark!
Don’t buy into the system kids, just Venmo me instead of—wait you can’t, nevermind, see above about leaving me alone
Mother’s Day = more fuckin’ work for mothers
And if you’re still married you’re fucked even worse. Then you have to brunch or buy shit for his mother
Could go on and on ;)
And don’t get me started on dead mothers, shitty mothers
Doesn’t Facebook make you wanna barf? I stop looking Friday through Tues lol. It’s like my annual cleanse
The biggest detox of my life happened when I purged my parents’ hoarder house in 2017 and rifled through all the complicated ephemera of my youth and beyond. Among some of the dubious treasures I’ve unearthed here, include this “card” I made for my mom:
This motherhood stuff is no joke. It’s dangerous. Moms may not even survive it. All potential overly honest card-memes aside, the economic, physical and mental conditions of motherhood are weirdly not much improved upon in our country from what it was for our mothers. The pandemic really set us back, as did the slap to our ovaries from the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court. Stine sums up the situation here very well. A data point that really struck me, among many, was this nugget from our heyday of home-schooling and home-working in the Covid era when we were all cooped and cozy. And not equally yoked of course: 71% of men reported virtual work was a positive experience for them, compared to 41% of women, perhaps because the women also found themselves absorbing all the extra household stuff that inevitably comes with that deal, like making sure the man’s workday goes off without a hitch, while hers can be continually impeded.
There’s what Stine calls this societal “gaslighting” in celebrating us on this one day while doing nothing to acknowledge, let alone undo, these damning data points, not to mention the pain this holiday may cause for those like Dana who grieve their lost mother, or never had a great situation with their mother to begin with, or could never be a mother, or…
When I get past the saccharine shopping prompts and dig deeper into a “Mother’s Day is…” search online, the snarky women writers of the world are shouting in a resounding chorus: “bullshit,” “nonsense,” “the worst,” “stupid.”
I feel all this but I don’t want to call a complete time out either. It’s not true that I want nothing. Of course I still want to be celebrated! To me, the way this looks ideally—should anyone ask—is another one of these amazing homemade cards or two and some tiny act(s) of sincere kindness. That’s truly it. My kids have been the best at these cards; I will in turn hoard them forever. Kindness is a work in progress.
Maybe my daughter was onto the dicey economic ramifications of being a mom in America when she gave me a dollar here attached to her Mother’s Day card in 2019, when I was looney enough to think it was a good idea to camp in the rain with the Girl Scouts. I actually loved camping in the rain, and I adored this card, the dollar, and her heart-melting smile.
Now slip that under the door and leave me be.