MOTHER’S DAY AND SADNESS
You often can’t have one without the other
For years, Mother’s Day made me sad. Well, no, that’s not accurate. It wasn’t the fault of Mother’s Day, exactly. Infertility made me sad. But it made me sad on Mother’s Day. And the sadness wasn’t limited to one holiday. It often also came on Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving — any time that caused me to think of the children I might have had, the pregnancies I’d had and lost.
The sadness I felt on those days wasn’t all-consuming. I could still go out to brunch with the family, could still shop for flowers or gifts for my mom and grandmother. The holidays could still be joyful, could still have laughter.
The pain was more of a nagging reminder in the background, a wasp buzzing around my picnic.
And in that, I wasn’t alone. Plenty are stung the same way on Mother’s Day: people who have strained relationships with their mothers or children, people grieving a loss.
Companies lately have been catching on, realizing there is, for many, an inextricable link between Mother’s Day and sadness, particularly in the wake of a pandemic that took the lives of more than 500,000 in the U.S. alone. A movement to allow people to opt out of Mother’s Day marketing and promotional emails is picking up steam. For some, though, getting the opt-out email itself is just as bad as the Mother’s Day communications.
It all feels a bit futile, anyway, trying to divorce Mother’s Day from grief. Sadness, pain — even death — are baked into the very roots of the holiday.
More than 150 years ago, Ann Maria Jarvis worked an activist and organizer during the Civil War. It was her daughter who, after her mother’s death, would start the holiday later known in the U.S. as Mother’s Day.
Jarvis’ own experience as a mother was itself full of sadness. She gave birth to at least seven children who died before reaching adulthood. I wonder what pain tinged the holidays in the Jarvis house, as she looked around her table and saw, in her mind’s eye, the children she’d lost throughout the years? Which Christmases, Thanksgivings reminded her of death, of suffering or grief?
And it was the pain of missing her mother, who had recently died, that caused Jarvis’ daughter to start the holiday in the first place.
In Israel, Mother’s Day began as a way to honor Henrietta Szold, the creator of Hadassah Women. Szold never had children but helped save tens of thousands of them from dying in Nazi death camps. Still, the topic of mothering was a difficult one for her.
“I would exchange everything for one child of my own,” she reportedly told a friend.
Just as we all have mothers, we all have sadness, and it is only the very lucky and the very few who can think of parents or children without a tinge of it.
I’m not saying don’t opt out. I wouldn’t presume to tell people how to organize their lives. I also don’t know whether I would have taken advantage of or appreciated an offer to opt out of Mother’s Day marketing when I was in the throes of infertility. I anticipate, though, that if I had, it wouldn’t have completely prevented the suffering I felt, missing the children I wanted but could not have.
For that grief, that tiny ache of longing, wasn’t created by Mother’s Day, and it wouldn’t have been prevented by its absence.
I don’t relish the bad experiences of those days, the miscarriages and the heartbreak, the stress and anxiety, the low-level and ever-present sadness. But neither do I know who I would be without them.
There are many alternate lives I might have led, ones where I would have had more children, or fewer, or none. In some of those lives, I would have had children earlier, others, later. Traveling each different path would have changed me, made me a different person, and I suspect the same is true for us all.
Grief molds us, creates us anew. I can’t regret who I am, the children I have or the life I lead.
Instead, I have gratitude, not for the suffering, exactly, but for my emergence from it, for the strength to have lived through it and to have kept moving.
Grief, for me, was a journey, albeit one that I never truly completed. I never forgot it, entirely. I still feel the pain sometimes, when I think of the lost pregnancies, the difficult births.
In the meal of life, bitter herbs, sour vinegar, burning spice provide balance.
For some people, as it was for me all those years ago, it won’t be a sugarysweet happy Mother’s Day. Instead, it will be a day of sadness, of pain, of remembering.
For anyone with a wasp in their picnic on Sunday, know that you’re not alone.
You have far greater company, in fact, than you can ever know.