A Case for Getting Rid of Mother’s Day

Last updated on: May 6, 2016 at 8:02 am by Anne Kennedy

A Case for Getting Rid of Mother’s Day 2016-05-06T08:02:34-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Facebook has been busily reminding me that Mother’s Day is in three days–not soon enough for me to have sent a card, or anything, to my own mother, but early enough for me to be irritated for the entire week. Enough with all the quoth ‘celebrations’ of everything. The calendar is filled to the brim with remembrances and important moments, some of them taking a whole month. Teacher Appreciation (because only jerks don’t appreciate their teachers) Week, Office Administrators Week (because the economy wouldn’t exist without the person who makes the office run), Celiac, Autism, Breast Cancer, Black History Awareness Months, the two Star Wars days this week–I can’t keep up. If I were to mark every day that matters, well, I can’t do it.

Mother’s Day, though, is the one I love most to hate. First of all, it’s on a Sunday. So, um, ugh. Sunday is a work day for me. I wake up at 5 and Matt wakes up at 3 and the children wake up around 7 and are all over at church by 7:30. They stay there, as indeed do I, until something like 2 o’clock. The whole day, Sunday, is not about the mother, it’s about Jesus. But we give carnations to mothers anyway, because we’re not awful. Whenever I do manage to get home, my family is afflicted with guilt that they should have remembered that it was Mother’s Day, and all I got was a carnation at church. So some of the children try to make cards. Except that I’m a bad mother, and it’s the end of the school year, and so they have no good paper. So they come and whine a lot about how they would have made a card, but there’s no paper, and eventually I yell at them for whining. Then my very tired husband, who already made the lunch and preached the sermon, has to consider whether he’s willing to let me gain points for cleaning the kitchen on Mother’s Day, which is really beyond the pale, or fall asleep, as he indeed needs to do. So we bicker a little bit and then collapse into bed.

And that’s when I can get on Facebook and see the complaints of lots of other mothers who hate Mother’s Day, and the very beautiful things that some children and husbands did for their mothers, and judge the pagan mothers who lay a bed for a long while and were delivered breakfast and then went out to brunch or something. And then finally it’s all over and I get to return to my own #sanespace for another year.

If I was Queen of the World (maybe I should run third party) I would clear the calendar of every single holiday. Maybe even Christmas and everything. The world is a vast and diverse place, people will celebrate what’s important to them. For me, that’s Easter, followed by other treasured church holidays. But I don’t want to virtue preen all, or any, of my celebrations. I just want to celebrate them. I wouldn’t even put birthdays in. The celebrating of birthdays is exhausting and impossible. What’s to be gained by thinking that other people, even for a day, should be twisting in knots to think about me? And yet we train children, from infancy, to consider themselves and their own expectations for a single whole day (actually lots more than that when you add in Christmas and the Easter bunny, who began to perish just a little bit for me this year). The charm and magic of being grateful for another person, and thinking of them with joy and perhaps honor, has been turned into a burdensome obligation for some, an opportunity to show off for others, and a moment to feel disappointed for the one who should be so honored.

I kind of go crazy when I have to stop and think about what kind of mother I am. I’m just a mother. I do a lot of bad things. I do a fair number of good ones. My children are alive and healthy and basically happy and will probably do well in this complicated and interesting world. I’m happy when they give me a jam covered card with an indecipherable scribble on it. I’m also happy when they just do what I say.

When motherhood is truly honored as a cultural virtue, and children are similarly thought to be a good thing, then I might be able to get back on board the Mother’s Day train. But these both are dubious moral qualities in this brave new world. Mothers are often led to believe that giving life to their children will be the end of their own lives. They are frequently abandoned by the father to live at the mercy of the state and its benevolent poverty. Children are a choice that we make, not a gift from a God who loves us and would gather us as a hen gathers her chicks, but we would not be gathered. And then there are the mothers who wanted their babies but they were lost into the hands of Jesus before they even saw the light of day. And the people who have just lost their mothers. And the people who had terrible mothers. So that this day is just another opportunity to mark out the sorrow.

Who’s with me? Let’s have a ten year rest cure from Mother’s Day!

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