It’s time to put an end to Mother’s Day
American social activist Anna Jarvis may be the mother of Mother’s Day — Jarvis founded the holiday in the United States in the early 1900s, in honour of her own late mother.
But historians are unanimous about one thing: Jarvis was no fan of her offspring. This is because when Jarvis launched the movement to establish a day recognizing mothers she did not envision the pink, floral, commercial behemoth the holiday would grow up to become.
What did Jarvis envision for Mother’s Day?
Moms working together for a better world. Jarvis hoped the holiday would develop into a day of unified action, one on which American moms might advocate for mothers less fortunate than them. Fat chance. Today, Mother’s Day means many things to many people — breakfast in bed, flowers, scented candles, mugs that say “No. 1 mom” — but social justice isn’t usually one of them. Brunch is.
And yet, as though egged on by the ghost of Anna Jarvis, critics of the spring holiday abound. Every year, Mother’s Day — and Father’s Day too for that matter — are ridiculed for their Hallmark-, Indigo-inspired consumerism. Lately though, these holidays are getting a bad rap for something else too: Rather than make people feel good, they tend to make them feel bad or excluded.
For example: Both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are extremely difficult for people who have lost parents or children, a reality that many who have experienced stillbirth pregnancies, for instance, have begun to write about openly in recent years.
The gendered holidays are also generally a drag for non-binary parents who don’t identify with a single gender. Some of these parents have even begun advocating online for the creation of a brand new holiday to recognize parents who aren’t male or female. (A proposed date for “Non-Binary Parents Day” is July 17).
None of these critics have proposed scrapping Mother’s Day or Father’s Day altogether. But I’m beginning to wonder if that’s exactly what we should do.
After all, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day aren’t merely painful for a lot of people or exclusionary to some:
They are often simply more trouble than they are worth — for everyone.
Survey research shows that one of the most common complaints about these parental-honour holidays is that they’re a lot of hard work and stress for precisely the people they are meant to pamper. A big reason for this is that beyond the obligation to see family members you may not want to see, these holidays don’t fall on a day of our own choosing — and unlike Christmas, New Year’s or Thanksgiving, you don’t necessarily get a day off work. You may love everyone in your family and you may love brunch, but if you don’t get to see your loved ones and eat your breakfast in bed on your own terms, at a time of your own choosing, then Mother’s Day can be a burden rather than a boon.
This is why I’d like to propose that we scrap both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for good. And in the spirit of both inclusivity and selfishness, I’d like to propose a new holiday called “Guardian’s Day.” Guardian’s Day, which has a nice sci-fi fantasy ring to it, will be a rotating statutory holiday — meaning you can celebrate it any day you please, and you can interpret it any way you like. A guardian can be a mom, a dad, a non-binary parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a pet owner, or why the heck not — somebody who takes really good care of his houseplants.
Guardian’s Day may not fulfil Anna Jarvis’s dream of moms working together to help the less fortunate (it would also most certainly lead to the production of millions of the kind of impersonal greeting cards she hated so much). But at the very least, it might mean that the people the day is meant to honour might actually, for once, enjoy themselves. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.