On Mother’s Day, be what you admire most about mom
An experiment: spend an hour reading Instagram captions this Sunday. It will be boring, because they’ll all be the same, but it will also be cute. Adult children posting glowing throwback photos is a Mother’s Day tradition, where declarations are made in hashtags about their role model, their inspiration, their everything. (I honestly do wonder, every time, if anyone asked for their mom’s permission to post it, or is casually assuming ownership of a mother’s image a natural extension of always being her kid, with entitled, sticky jam hands?)
It’s nice, this pink-and-purple bouquet of appreciation for life’s most hardened warriors. Those of us who are lucky enough to have, or have had, a good mom, or someone mom-esque, should be throwing glitter parades for them, and then later giving them piñatas filled with luxury skin care and individually wrapped dark chocolates and the log-in and password for a secret seventh season of Downton Abbey (this might be specific to my mom, sure), or just leaving them alone for 48 consecutive hours, whatever they’re into. Women, especially older women, have gotten wherever they are by cutting through murky waves of social, emotional, psychic and physical pain. A legitimate Mother’s Day would mean airlifting them out of these Instagram posts and dropping them somewhere, I don’t know, holy.
What could the grown-up kid do to properly acknowledge, really, the daily galaxies of effort, attention, care, sacrifice, boredom, loneliness and loss that motherhood demands? When I prepare the small pile of go-to Mother’s Day gifts that my mom always likes, the gesture seems inescapably absurd, as if anything I could come up with could address, even in its minor symbolism of appreciation, how I still think “I want my mom” when I’m really scared or sad, the need for her voice and hands and calm and presence as urgent as it ever was.
The chasm between wanting to communicate that you see them, and appreciate them, and how we usually do it, via annual hashtags and optimistic peonies and books with Oprah stickers on them, is then filled with another chasm — if that’s a metaphysical possibility? — between glorifying moms (as social engineers, high-efficiency household CEOs, and doing whatever their job-job is; always tenacious and diligent and self-denying, but also forever available, open and warm), as a group and individually, and acknowledging their humanness, including their failures and struggles, even when you need them to never change, to provide an essential, unique comfort, to look up to, and to be something supernatural.
This, I think, is the most fundamental challenge within the most fundamental relationship: it might be impossible to separate enough from someone who is so much a part of your identity and perspective and “self” to actually receive them as their own, complicated person — which is why we might go straight to our mom when something real happens, but then snap at her two hours later when she gets our takeout order wrong.
My dad’s favourite thing to say about my mom is “Your mother would go to a dog fight.” It’s sweet. I mean, no, she wouldn’t attend an actual dog fight, but she would, and does, go anywhere, on rollercoasters, into Icelandic volcanoes, ziplining, for an ice cream when anyone suggests it. She is my puppy’s favourite person, has perfect handwriting, an ease with domestica that I am still decoding, and went back to school when she still had two teenagers and the doll-sized version of me, the latespring millennial blossom of our family. Just thinking of her saying “You’re fine” is sometimes what gets me through a moment in which I might otherwise hyperventilate.
So what do I do with all that, beyond say thank you, always in these supermicro-tiny Hallmark-holiday ways? I can be — I am — inspired by her; she is heroic to me. Learning from her, and actively pursuing in your own life the things about her that you admire, as listed on her Mother’s Day card, is probably a better strategy than spending an hour wandering a department store, picking up and putting down candles, perfume, whatever. I mean, I know I’m trying.