I am going to make a statement that is bound to strike my
readers as politically incorrect. Even shocking. It is simply this: I hate
Mother’s Day. I have hated it for years – even the years before my mother died,
but especially afterward. I thought having my own kids would make me like it,
but no … not really. I guess I basked in the glow of my first Mother’s Day, but
since it was little over a month after giving birth, I pretty much attribute
that to a chemical rush of happy hormones.
It’s probably got a lot to do with expectations. Thinking
that just because the calendar says it’s Mother’s Day, our children will not
just flood us with cards, gifts and flowers, but will be stricken with some
sudden mea culpa moment when they
will prostrate themselves at our feet, beg our forgiveness for all the times
they tore our hearts out, and promise to strive harder to reach the pinnacle of
perfection we expected for them on the day they were born.
On the flip side, there is the hope – quickly dashed – that
our relationship with our own mother will magically be healed by the simple act
of bestowing a Hallmark greeting upon her. All the years of tears and
disappointments, all the fights and harsh words, instantly erased –
abracadabra! And in my case, where even
that slim chance of reconciliation disappeared in the sudden chill of an
October night in 1978, the regret over what will never be … assuaged only
somewhat by the knowledge that it never really could have been anyway.
So today when everyone is posting pictures of flowers and
verses of sweet poetry and trite syrupy sentiments on Facebook, I won’t be
participating. All I’m offering is this rather cynical, negative blog post.
(You can thank me after you get over the sugar hangover.) It’s not that I do
not have any appreciation for the wonderful, difficult, usually unsung job
mothers do. I am one, after all. It’s just that I don’t think one day is enough
to encompass the joys and the sorrows, the highs and the lows, the intricacies
and the ambivalence of how it feels to bear the name “MOM.”
What’s the answer? Hallmark doesn’t know. 1-800-FLOWERS
doesn’t know. And I certainly don’t know.
