When it comes to Mother’s Day, why is it all about me?

I feel like writing about my Mother’s Day 2022 will not help anyone in this household.

Then again, writing about Roe v. Wade isn’t going to go well, either.

“Why not merge the two?” a friend suggested, cheerfully.

Regardless of your position on Roe, I can think of no worse time to engage in this discussion than in the days directly following Mother’s Day — or National Disappointment Day, as so many of us call it.

And yet here we are. It’s as if the intersection of Mother’s Day 2022 and the issues swirling around Roe have conspired to put us in a place most mothers know well: no man’s land.

And I mean that literally, as in “no man.” Not one.

“The thing that’s the worst about Mother’s Day,” a friend told me, “is that you realize how much your husband can’t deal without you.”

And when that reality crosses with a holiday that demands that the very person who can’t deal must deal SO THAT the person who always deals is celebrated for once (because her dealing is co-dependently and directly linked to his lack of deal-age )— and all of this is done with express purpose of thanking the Dealer for all her dealing — the result is not well dealt with.

“Talk about a set-up,” a dad friend yelled into the phone.

According to him, Mother’s Day was worse than New Year’s.

“What’s wrong with New Year’s?” I asked.

“That it’s a new year,” he said.

But unlike New Year’s, what’s so weird about Mother Day’s is that every year I feel like I’m one step ahead, like I’ve learned, I know the drill, and this time I’ve got it down. From logistics to managed expectations, I’m not going to fall for “the Mother’s Day trap” this year.

Thus I start off strong, only to end the day by looking out the kitchen window, past the rhododendron with the football in it, wondering, “Why?”

“This year I bought myself flowers, blank Mother’s Day cards that would appeal to, well, me … I even set up the bloody breakfast tray the night before — and by 7 a.m., everyone was crying,” my friend Maude told me.

I had a similar experience. We were supposed to go to Mother’s Day brunch at 1:30 p.m. in town, with my mom coming in from Brooklyn to meet us. By 12:40, George was halfnaked and wielding a light saber in front of the TV, Selma was still asleep and Louie was on hour two in the bathroom listening to Eminem (who REALLY doesn’t like his mother, by the way).

Meanwhile, I had spent the morning watching a continual loop of Rich Strike crossing the Kentucky Derby finish line with 80-1 odds against him, sobbing. Rich Strike’s victory resonated deep within, somehow.

“MOM, I HAVE NO SOAP, AGAIN,” I heard Louie holler from the shower, but I was headed toward my own finish line — and this thoroughbred had even put on lipstick.

“Look, I’m going to go ahead,” I told my husband, Ian, nonchalantly at 12:45, peeping my head into his office. “I’ll pick up Mom and meet you there.”

“What?” Ian responded blankly.

Ian was dressed to the nines, which is often his sole contribution to getting our family out of the door — a contribution he always seems perplexed I don’t recognize. Why Ian seems perpetually astonished that a 50-year-old man’s ability to dress himself has yet again eluded my appreciation is beyond me. But to make matters worse, I usually have no idea what I am wearing, my stockings are already torn and I’ve been through two metaphysical debates with a teenager on the societal implications of putting on a tie in an “age of inequity.”

“Ready?” Ian will ask me, cheerfully oblivious, from the driver’s seat of the minivan where he has been “waiting for me” — all dolled up in his tweed — completely unaware of the fact that my skirt is on backward.

Well, not this time. It was Mother’s Day 2022, and I was one step ahead.

“I’ll see you there,” I said slipping out the door, while Ian looked at me like I was a dragon.

Picking anyone up on Mother’s Day at the Greenwich Train Station is a spectacle in and of itself; the amount of flowers and bouquets that pour out onto the platform is as if New York City was paying homage to mothers everywhere. Plus, these are flowers meant for Greenwich moms so it’s like a parade in floral one-upmanship.

“Are the kids meeting us there?” my mother asked, surprised I was rolling solo.

“We’ll see,” I said smiling, like a dragon.

I had told Ian that if there was a lot of yelling to get the gang out of the house than it just wasn’t worth coming. Because everyone would just end up mad on Mother’s Day — a comment that made Ian yell at me.

And even though Ian got all the kids to brunch on time, they didn’t look so good.

“Never ever let Dad do that again, Mom,” George told me, as he sat down.

Mother’s Day was spearheaded in 1908 by a woman named Anna Jarvis who wanted to celebrate mothers everywhere after the devastation of the Civil War. Jarvis got into it, campaigning for Mother’s Day until Congress recognized at as an official holiday in 1914.

But here’s the kicker: Jarvis tried to take it back. When she saw how commercialized the holiday became, she called on card companies and florists to stop. By the 1920s, Jarvis was literally going door-todoor collecting petitions against Mother’s Day and spent “the rest of her life trying to abolish the holiday she founded.”

Which brings us back to Roe.

Look, there’s no good ways to fully celebrate mothers at a time when a woman’s procreative choices are at the center of everyone’s mind. Because let’s face it: Motherhood is at the center of everything; making humans, not making them, making yourself while making, or not, making life — or better yet, constantly unmaking yourself to make, or not make, the world go round — because somehow it’s all on you.

Flowers and cards are nice, but they always seem to fall short of the pain, love, horror, beauty and exhaustion of motherhood. And when the breakfast tray comes up, the flowers bunched with ribbons, and the cards adorned, you always end up thinking you are the one who’s behind it all, anyway. Because you are. Even when you’re not.