The Weird
Thing About Mother’s Day
For most of the life that I shared with my mother (that
would be from my birth until eight years ago, when she died), Mom made fun of
Mother’s Day. Or at least was
cynical about it.
--Mother’s Day: a trumped up ‘holiday’ first promoted
by Philadelphia merchants and continually pushed by the greeting card
industry.
--Mother’s Day: a ‘holiday’ passed
into official national status as a feel-good, cost-nothing (to the government,
anyway) measure right before World War I.
--Mother’s Day: an occasion for children to get their
aesthetically challenged creations praised by a parent. (To be fair, this is an adult-me
surmise not based on anything Mom ever said but on the fact that, despite having daughters who were relatively talented artistically, she was not one to
stick random scribbles on refrigerators or ugly child-made ornaments on
Christmas trees.)
In other words, when I was a child, we never celebrated
Mother’s Day. My sister and I may
have dragged home a card or another clumsy craft we made in school, but I can’t
recall ever giving such lame efforts to my mom. In fact, I remember dumping some of them in the trash. We didn’t have a special dinner,
engineered by my dad. And God
forbid that Daddy would get her anything.
I think that happened once, and the result was a high-snifferoony “What
are you thinking? I’m not your
mother.”
Same thing with Father’s Day. Perhaps it was Mom’s attitude toward these commercial
holidays, or perhaps it was Dad’s independent judgment. In any event, we didn’t celebrate
Father’s Day either.
This is not to imply that I grew up in a joyless,
ultra-rational household. Far from
it. We celebrated ‘real’ holidays
to the max: birthdays, Christmas,
Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, May
Day. Even April Fool’s Day: my mother would pack my lunch box with
oddities – either with icky surprises (mayonnaise and pickle sandwiches, both
ingredients that I loathed) or with unexpected treats (a candy bar, a
frosting-drenched cupcake) – and a somewhat enigmatic note reading: ‘April Fool’s. I love you!’
Even when my sister and I were grown, with children of our
own and living far from our parents, we continued the ban on Mother’s Day (at
least with our mother – I like to think that we welcomed our own kids’
school-inspired offerings with more enthusiasm). But then a weird change started to happen. Maybe in response to our own enjoyment
of our children’s Mother’s Day efforts, we started at least calling Mom on
Mother’s Day (this was back when long-distance calls were still a semi-big
deal). And Dad on Father’s
Day. Our parents seemed to like
these fake-holiday-inspired calls, much to our initial surprise.
So the Mother’s and Father’s Day boycott crumbled. My parents retired and moved closer to
my sister and very close to me.
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day became occasions to make a nice dinner for
them, or take them out, or for a visit from my sister. My parents got older, and more
feeble. Mother’s Day and Father’s
Day soon included little presents as well as get-togethers.
In their last years, our parents accepted my sister’s and my
attempts to celebrate what had once been ridiculed holidays with an almost
heartbreaking gratitude. Mother’s
Day and Father’s Day – marked by cards, gifts, dinners – had now become
signifiers of family solidarity and affection.
The weird thing about these manufactured holidays is that
their meanings change profoundly over time, for children as well as for
parents. After our parents die, we
still define ourselves as their children and think of our being-on-earth as, in
part, measured by how well we have loved them . . . thoughts that can come to
the forefront on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. If this happens, we are the lucky ones: we’ve been blessed with families on
whom we’ve relied, from whom we’ve drawn emotional sustenance, and whom we miss
dearly because they were so very, very important to us.
My point today is simple: even if it’s a commercially driven event like Mother’s Day,
make the effort to let your parents know you care about them, and that they are
truly important to you. If needed,
you can acknowledge a family history of downplaying artificial occasions
(“Remember when we all laughed about how Aunt Alice would go on and on about
the Mother’s Day card she received from her son, whom she hasn’t seen in
years?”) and still do something to make your parents feel cherished. And feel that they accomplished an
important task: raising thoughtful, loving children who will be their most
lasting, maybe their only, legacy.
The older our parents get, the more important such beliefs,
reified by the small ceremonies surrounding Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, are
to them. And, with somewhat
different valences, to us – as our time together, as parents and children, is
growing inescapably shorter with every holiday.
And then it’s gone.