I Feel Weird About Mothers' Day

I feel weird about Mothers’ Day.  I feel about Mothers’ Day the way I feel about my wedding anniversary, which is to say that without thinking about it in any conscious way, I’d always assumed that it was kind of a private affair to be recognized among the parties involved.  I am regularly surprised (though not in a bad way) when people that I have not given birth to wish me a happy Mothers’ Day. It doesn’t feel intrusive or anything, just unexpected, like thanking me for a favor I've done for a third party. It probably goes without saying that I don’t often think to wish other people a happy Mothers’ Day, except for my own actual mother.

Because I’ve been laboring under this entirely ahistorical delusion about the private (as opposed to public) significance of the day, I have a bit of an outsider’s perspective on the social aspect of Mothers’ Day, which feels to me to be increasing in volume.  I’ve noticed people/organizations on social media, at church, etc., making a praiseworthy effort to be inclusive about Mothers’ Day—remembering people who aren’t mothers, people who want to be mothers but aren’t, people who have lost their mothers, people who have bad relationships with their mothers, people who do the work of nurturing which is just like mothering, etc.  I am glad that all different kinds of experiences are recognized, whether on Mothers’ Day or not. But sometimes I think that many of us—mothers, people who aren’t mothers, the whole lot of us--would be better served by less sentimentalizing of motherhood every day of the year and especially on Mothers’ Day, when that stuff seems to hit an annual peak.  It’s as if we’ve made the celebration of Mothers’ Day such a big public deal and elevated motherhood above all other activities such that we then have to offer comfort to others for falling short of this elevated state.

There’s what feels like a strange (but familiar) dynamic where the real work of motherhood is oversentimentalized in a rhetorical sense even as it’s undervalued in a practical sense. Where motherhood is routinely identified as “the most important job in the world” but where the skills involved in mothering aren’t believed to be transferable to the workplace (witness the difficulties many women have reentering the workforce in spite of former education and experience because they are perceived as mothers rather than potential talent).  Where motherhood is both identified with other things, like the work of nurturing, but also so essentialized that to be a mother is to be placed into an exclusive (yet normative!) class of women. 

The actual means of celebrating Mothers’ Day also feels a little odd to me.  I think it’s nice that the kids try to do things like make breakfast in bed or let me sleep in—it’s sweet, and I think it’s good for them to express their gratitude, which mine are young enough to do with conspiratorial, chaotic joy.  Maybe it’s that a lot of the public (as opposed to private) efforts to build up hype around Mothers’ Day feels, somehow, marketed or performed.  The message communicated is often “You deserve ___!”  This message (the heart of so many advertising campaigns directed at women) bothers me all the time because I’m basically a Puritan with the suspicion that maybe all we really deserve is the chance to toil over the earth and hope it yields enough for survival—but it especially sounds an off-key note to me with regard to motherhood because I’m grateful to be mother. I’m happy to have the opportunity to have children. I hoped for and chose to have them. I don’t need a reward for it, at least not an extrinsic reward from the rest of society.  Sure, it’s a lot of work, but it’s work that for the most part I’m happy about and that I decided to take on (I also don’t expect “Professors’ Day”).  It’s lovely for my children to recognize what I do for them. But it feels disproportionate to expect that from the rest of society, where everyone is doing the unheralded work of their own lives in so many different ways. 

I’m not trying to hate on Mothers’ Day, or criticize efforts to recognize mothers, or take anything away from people who don’t feel appreciated in their roles as mothers (or not) on a daily basis. On the contrary, I think mothers who feel unappreciated should be supported with more than an annual bouquet or massage certificate, and people who feel undervalued for not being mothers should be recognized with all the honor they deserve. I kind of wonder whether our public and commercial sentimentality about Mothers’ Day obscures our need to recognize and support the people we name on that day—the ones who are and aren’t mothers—in meaningful and consistent ways throughout the year.