My problem with Mother's Day

So today is Mother's Day

 As a 35-year-old woman who’d love to be a mum but isn’t it’s a weird day. Mother’s day for me this year is about absence. Let’s leave aside the fact that online it feels like every day is mother’s day, my Facebook feed is covered in smug memes telling me I don’t yet understand love because as yet I’ve failed to push anything out my chuff. Let’s also ignore that my own mother is out of the country so I’m not able to celebrate with her either. That Mother’s day is something I’ll celebrate by proxy with my mother in law.

I think the reason I don’t care for Mother’s day is that it boils down a lifelong reciprocal relationship into one day a year. I’m not bought into the idea that the way you celebrate Mother’s day reflects how well loved you are, or how much you know about loving.

Me & My Mum

 

Mother’s day, is one of those times where we’re all supposed to feel like we’re part of a club. Where we’re all united by our shared experience of being mothered, or being a mother.

One of those clubs I couldn’t be in if I tried. But I think both are a bit of a con. They suggest that mothering or being mothered is a universal experience, and I simply do not believe that is true. It is true that I don’t know how it feels to be a mother, but my friends who have children don’t know how it feels to parent each other’s children either. My experience of loving my husband is different to their experiences of loving theirs. There is no equivalency when you talk about love, it’s always different – it’s unique because it has to be, a reflection of a relationship between two complex individuals.

My family is a perfect example of that. My mum loves us all equally – but our relationships with her are as unique as we are.

Actually I take that back – she doesn’t love us all equally. What a horrible trite phrase. Love is not measured in cups and ounces. I’ll rephrase – she doesn’t love any of us more- or less than any of the others. She loves us differently.

The measures of our love are different for myself and my sisters for the rest of the year, for me it’s about how often I can get mum to laugh at something she feels she shouldn’t, how often she comforts me by reminding me that time passes and that when I look back I'll see things differently. I know that my sisters look at different things, have their own in jokes and special memories. And yet this one day a year we’re supposed to pick a generic card out of the rack and have it express everything about our relationship, and it can’t. If even we as sisters couldn't agree on one perfect card, then it has to be nonsense for the rest of the world.

We could probably agree that '90's fashions weren't that kind on any of us though....

 

I won’t find a Mother’s day card that thanks my mum for making my childhood magical in the particular way she did. Taking toys from my bed when I was poorly, and replacing them before I woke with new clothes on. Getting her friends to save those tiny margarine tubs Harvester used to give out with baked potatoes so I had shoeboxes for my Sindy dolls. There is no mother’s day card that says thank you for not killing me when I left my dirty hockey boots in the airing cupboard all summer and they went mouldy. Nor is there one that says I’m sorry for losing my bus pass constantly and nearly crippling your finances with replacement costs. I think it’s unlikely I’ll find a card that reflects our particular memories - being made to sit on tea towels so we didn’t ruin the sofa, the time our puppy ate my friend’s wallet complete with the to – die- for concert tickets it contained, when I belly flopped into the pool on our first ever holiday abroad, or the next holiday we took on our own together to Italy nearly 30 years later.

My beautiful unique mum on my wedding day (no idea what my nephew is doing with his nose there)

My relationship with my mother isn’t generic. And neither is yours. The universal mother concept sentimentalises a relationship that is huge, and scary and feral in its immediacy. You may have a great relationship with your mother, you may have a terrible one – you may never have met her. The one thing we all share is that we were grown inside a woman’s body, and that probably our relationship (or lack of) with that woman has shaped us profoundly. But this day where we reduce those mothers into identikit cookie cutter benign princesses is insulting to them as unique individual women. By all means let’s celebrate our relationships with our mothers. Celebrate it today. But not with generic sentiment, and mass produced mother’s day tat. Go do the stuff your Mum loves to do with her, make her laugh over the phone, buy her a spanner if she’d prefer that to a ‘world’s best mum’ mug (who wouldn’t really), or maybe make your own card – or write her a love letter. I just did.  

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