Writer’s Log, May 9: Mothers’ Day
Now before you get your knickers in a twist, no, that’s not a typo. It’s a call to revolution.
It occurred to me yesterday that I can’t be the only mother who finds mother’s day deeply uncomfortable. Here I am muddling through caring for three kids 364 days a year, and then along comes this one day when they're supposed to thank me and put everything they feel about me into words on a card and/or into selecting the right gift. (Though I have to say that one of my favorite cards ever was the one in which my now thirteen-year-old son wrote in second grade: “Dear Mom. You’ve been a really good mom this year.” As if motherhood was a position to be annually renewed based on good behavior.)
The pressure is enormous for everyone involved. I never enjoy it because my kids and husband are on tenterhooks, and I feel obligated to become apoplectically happy over everything they give to me. I’m incredibly, ridiculously lucky that my kids and husband appreciate me in a myriad of small and big ways almost every day, a state I fervently wish on every single mother. But what really, really bothers me about mother’s day is the placement of that godforsaken apostrophe.
Listen up, folks: mothers should never, ever do their jobs alone. This is a horrible sentence to decree on any parent, and it goes against everything our functional mammalian heritage has offered us. Is there any other mother in nature who is expected to be the primary caregiver to her young from the ages of 0 through 18 (or maybe, more realistically, 28 or 38, given the extended adolescence that has grown in popularity over the last several decades)? Can you imagine a momma orangutan being left in her orangutan corner by the rest of her tribe immediately after giving birth so she could “have space and get to know her baby?” As if a mother’s bond to her child was as tenuous and delicate as magic beans sprouting in the rare light of a full moon. Let me tell you that the moment that child is ripped from your body, there is no one and nothing that can keep you from loving it so fiercely you are sure your heart might just explode from your chest at any moment during its long and complicated life. So I’m going to answer the orangutan question for you: No. If that were to happen, the orangutan would give into her natural instincts and toss the baby to the nearest passing lion after about forty-eight hours of maddening solitude before returning with PTSD to a herd that would maybe keep her psychologically and emotionally damaged self around for a few weeks before tossing her to the nearest passing lion without a second thought. Because she would have gone against every natural instinct mammals have cultivated over the past several thousand years.
I know, I know. You want to object because humans are different. We’re socialized. We’re evolved. We know better. Or do we?
My own mother was a part of the Mother’s Day culture. The one where she was supposed to do everything for us and in which asking for help was perceived as a slight on her character. It destroyed her, and it almost destroyed us. I have never met anyone more capable of maternal love, but living up to the mothering standard -- and this was before mothers were really seen as needing anything like careers or creative outlets -- was her undoing.
And yet I still know far too many mothers who call themselves “bad mothers” if, god forbid, they forget to bring the toilet paper rolls to school on Wednesday by 9:30 AM for the kindergartner’s “Create a Turtle” craft project, even though they made breakfast for him and got him dressed and make sure he gets to school on time and that he has what he needs to eat and that his dentist appointment doesn’t conflict with his AYSO schedule or his grandparents’ decision to drop into town and stay for a few nights last minute or his dad’s need for her to cook and clean and run the budget because he has to work 80 hours that week to make ends meet.
And I promise you, Scout’s honor and all that, that this scenario is just a teeny, tiny window into most mother’s daily realities. In fact, I am sure that if most mothers really stopped to think what they do in a day or week or month or year, they’d see that they were defying the laws of human physical and psychological capacities and realize, just like the guy in those old Bugs Bunny cartoon who runs off the cliff and keeps going in thin air until he looks down, that they should have crashed and burned long ago.
Mothers are wondrous beings, but they are, indeed, beings, and we should tend to them as such. Are their lives and comforts any less valuable? Do we want to teach our kids that our worth lies in how hyper-responsible we are, how little we seek out the talents of others, how little we bask in compassion? Heros are lonely and die early on the battlefield. Mothering, on the other hand, is something each one of can come to in a variety of ways, and when we do we only find greater comfort and a real sense of the value of lives beyond our own
.
If only we had mothers’ days instead. Several warm and naturally celebratory days during the year when we congratulated ourselves on our collective mothering efforts, congratulated ourselves on a culture in which we unhooked mothers from the unbelievably high standards we’ve strung them to and put all our hands into the funny, messy, clumsy, imperfect, community effort it takes to make children into the sort of in touch, creative, socially aware, adaptive, and engaged human beings we all want to know.
It occurred to me yesterday that I can’t be the only mother who finds mother’s day deeply uncomfortable. Here I am muddling through caring for three kids 364 days a year, and then along comes this one day when they're supposed to thank me and put everything they feel about me into words on a card and/or into selecting the right gift. (Though I have to say that one of my favorite cards ever was the one in which my now thirteen-year-old son wrote in second grade: “Dear Mom. You’ve been a really good mom this year.” As if motherhood was a position to be annually renewed based on good behavior.)
The pressure is enormous for everyone involved. I never enjoy it because my kids and husband are on tenterhooks, and I feel obligated to become apoplectically happy over everything they give to me. I’m incredibly, ridiculously lucky that my kids and husband appreciate me in a myriad of small and big ways almost every day, a state I fervently wish on every single mother. But what really, really bothers me about mother’s day is the placement of that godforsaken apostrophe.
Listen up, folks: mothers should never, ever do their jobs alone. This is a horrible sentence to decree on any parent, and it goes against everything our functional mammalian heritage has offered us. Is there any other mother in nature who is expected to be the primary caregiver to her young from the ages of 0 through 18 (or maybe, more realistically, 28 or 38, given the extended adolescence that has grown in popularity over the last several decades)? Can you imagine a momma orangutan being left in her orangutan corner by the rest of her tribe immediately after giving birth so she could “have space and get to know her baby?” As if a mother’s bond to her child was as tenuous and delicate as magic beans sprouting in the rare light of a full moon. Let me tell you that the moment that child is ripped from your body, there is no one and nothing that can keep you from loving it so fiercely you are sure your heart might just explode from your chest at any moment during its long and complicated life. So I’m going to answer the orangutan question for you: No. If that were to happen, the orangutan would give into her natural instincts and toss the baby to the nearest passing lion after about forty-eight hours of maddening solitude before returning with PTSD to a herd that would maybe keep her psychologically and emotionally damaged self around for a few weeks before tossing her to the nearest passing lion without a second thought. Because she would have gone against every natural instinct mammals have cultivated over the past several thousand years.
I know, I know. You want to object because humans are different. We’re socialized. We’re evolved. We know better. Or do we?
My own mother was a part of the Mother’s Day culture. The one where she was supposed to do everything for us and in which asking for help was perceived as a slight on her character. It destroyed her, and it almost destroyed us. I have never met anyone more capable of maternal love, but living up to the mothering standard -- and this was before mothers were really seen as needing anything like careers or creative outlets -- was her undoing.
And yet I still know far too many mothers who call themselves “bad mothers” if, god forbid, they forget to bring the toilet paper rolls to school on Wednesday by 9:30 AM for the kindergartner’s “Create a Turtle” craft project, even though they made breakfast for him and got him dressed and make sure he gets to school on time and that he has what he needs to eat and that his dentist appointment doesn’t conflict with his AYSO schedule or his grandparents’ decision to drop into town and stay for a few nights last minute or his dad’s need for her to cook and clean and run the budget because he has to work 80 hours that week to make ends meet.
And I promise you, Scout’s honor and all that, that this scenario is just a teeny, tiny window into most mother’s daily realities. In fact, I am sure that if most mothers really stopped to think what they do in a day or week or month or year, they’d see that they were defying the laws of human physical and psychological capacities and realize, just like the guy in those old Bugs Bunny cartoon who runs off the cliff and keeps going in thin air until he looks down, that they should have crashed and burned long ago.
Mothers are wondrous beings, but they are, indeed, beings, and we should tend to them as such. Are their lives and comforts any less valuable? Do we want to teach our kids that our worth lies in how hyper-responsible we are, how little we seek out the talents of others, how little we bask in compassion? Heros are lonely and die early on the battlefield. Mothering, on the other hand, is something each one of can come to in a variety of ways, and when we do we only find greater comfort and a real sense of the value of lives beyond our own
.
If only we had mothers’ days instead. Several warm and naturally celebratory days during the year when we congratulated ourselves on our collective mothering efforts, congratulated ourselves on a culture in which we unhooked mothers from the unbelievably high standards we’ve strung them to and put all our hands into the funny, messy, clumsy, imperfect, community effort it takes to make children into the sort of in touch, creative, socially aware, adaptive, and engaged human beings we all want to know.
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