I'm anti Mother's Day. Well, maybe not anti. Maybe I'm just ambivalent about the "holiday." I don't understand why we need a day to honor mothers. Or fathers, grandparents, etc. My daughter-in-law talks to her [wonderful] mother on the phone every day, sometimes multiple times a day. In their world, every day is Mother's Day. And Daughter's Day.
I've had numerous mothers in my life. There was the woman who gave birth to me and, six days later, gave me away. Then there was the woman who, now that I'm 70 I've come to realize, probably didn't want to adopt me. I believe my adoption was solely my daddy's desire. And I thank the universe for him every day. There were four mothers-in-law, who may or may not have been pleased with my marriage to their sons. As I look back, I think of them all as having been kind to me. But I was already damaged goods in the needing-a-mother department. Mothers, for the most part, and by the very nature of being mothers, tend to want to train their offspring. And I didn't think I needed their training, so we were already off to a bad start when we first laid eyes on each other.
But back to Mother's Day.
I consider Mother's Day to be yet another Hallmark holiday. And I don't like the commercialization of anything. Maybe I'm just a grinch at heart.
Here is what I posted on Facebook today:
If Mother's Day is important to you, if you consider yourself a mother-figure to your children, step-children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, the neighborhood kids, your dogs and cats and fish, your students, the person in the cubicle next to yours or the Zoom window next to yours, or any other being, then I wish you a Happy Mother's Day.
If, like me, you consider it nothing more than an opportunity for commercial establishments to ramp up their marketing efforts and use it as an opportunity to bring in a little extra income, then we can ignore it together. Commercialization be damned. We cynics can unite.
If it's painful to you for any reason - you've always wanted to have a child, but nature or life got in the way; you had a crappy relationship with your mother who had no business being a mother; you lost one too many babies to miscarriage or a childhood illness or an awful accident; because of circumstances in your life, you had to make the difficult decision to abort the pregnancy and have always struggled with that memory; because of circumstances in your life, you had to give a child up for adoption; or any other reason that makes the day painful fo you - I'm sending you a hug and hoping you have someone to talk to about it, if that would help. My heart goes out to you.
To the companies who have told their call center staff, "if you talk to any female this weekend, be sure to end the call with 'Happy Mother's Day," you need to wake up. Being female doesn't equate to being a mother. There are so many more factors involved. And there are so many circumstances you know nothing about.
When I woke up thinking about this topic this morning, I decided to search the internet on "Who invented Mother's Day." I found out it was "Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia." You can read all about her [on Britannica .com]. But here's the most important part of the whole article: "What had originally been primarily a day of honour became associated with the sending of cards and the giving of gifts, however, and, in protest against its commercialization, Jarvis spent the last years of her life trying to abolish the holiday she had brought into being."
Anna, I salute you.
And to my second husband, who knew how difficult the day was for me and, nevertheless, with a nyah nyahnyah nyah nyah tone to his voice, said to me, "I didn't get you anything for Mother's Day. You're not my mother," well, you can take your tiniest of tiny hearts and shove it where the sun don't shine. You were beyond insensitive. There are soooo many reasons I'm no longer married to you!
There were specific factors that first soured me on Mother's Day. They came out of the first marriage (which I knew two weeks in was a Very Bad Mistake). And the ensuing divorce. The thing is—I walked out on my marriage. And in doing so, I walked out on my two little boys, ages six and five. My intention was not to walk out on them; they were unintended victims. What I was walking out on was the emotionally abusive husband of ten years.
I remarried two years later, concurrent with a IBM transfer from the Dallas area to the D.C. suburbs. I got to see my boys every summer and on alternate holidays. If I wanted to talk to them, I would call them in Dallas, and they might or might not be available for my call. Their hyper-religious father treated me as if I was Satan's sister. He said horrible things about me to them (per their comments to me), and saw no reason to treat me as if I were still their mother. They were instructed to address his new wife as "Mother." On Mother's Day, all deference was to her. I would get not a call, not a card, not a thing. And everywhere around me was Mother's Day this and Mother's Day that. Not one person acknowledged that I was a mother who, in walking out on the marriage, had done the only thing she knew how to do in trying to protect herself from a cruel-to-her husband.
As, year after year, the pain of those empty Mother's Days added up, I did what was natural to me: I built a wall around my heart. I acted as if the day didn't exist. I made it not matter to me.
As I draw to the close of this recount, I wish to state clearly that—in my mind, my heart, my opinion—my sons bear no responsibility for these Mother's Day omissions. They were in their own preteen world. Had they been one ounce aware of the upcoming "holiday" (and I use that term very loosely!), and wanted to send me a card, they would have had to depend on the not-good will toward me of their stepmother and their father to get to the store, choose a card, ask for the money to buy the card, ask their dad for my address, ask for a stamp .... You get the idea. If they had wanted to call me that day, they would have had to ask for my phone number. Nothing was easy. Nothing was facilitated.
And in the back of their sweet minds lay the time they were with their grandmother at Walt Disney World and saw some cute tchotchke they wanted to buy for me. When they asked her if they could buy it, she responded, "Why do you want to buy her anything? She walked out on you." (Per their statement to me sometime thereafter—watch out what you say to children of divorce. It always gets back to the target.)
Now, forty years later, I tell myself not to bristle when someone lovingly wishes me a happy Mother's Day. I work very hard to just respond graciously, to just say "thank you."
And my guys, my wonderful men, now 47 and 46? Since we first brought the subject of my walking out—okay, let's use the "a" word, my abandonment—to light in their late teens and twenties, they were nothing but loving and forgiving. They said they understood why I would walk out on their dad. They have never appeared to hold a grudge, to be bitter, to be anything but kind and supportive and loving.
My forgiving myself is an entirely different matter. I don't think I beat myself up about it. But I do, ruefully and not infrequently, wish that I had had the resources to realize I was not helpless in the situation. I do feel sorry for that young mother with frequent, sometimes month-long, migraines, that thirty-year-old wife with a husband who went from job to job on a whim "because God told me to", and who had no inclination to help around the house and with the children. She was a lost soul with no apparent-to-her support system. May the young wives and mothers of the 21st century know the support that society offers them today. May society in this country that is currently in upheaval put politics aside and care about those in need, whatever that need may be.
And if Mother's Day is important to you, may you have a happy Mother's Day, with due deference from those who love you.
