I love being a mom to four kids, but I hate Mother’s Day. Here’s why
Mother’s Day is one of the lamest holidays, a Hallmark one, just like Valentine’s Day: Like its romantic cousin, its existence depends on whether you meet a requirement, whether you are a mother (or have a lover). It’s also wildly overblown — Americans will spend nearly $32 billion on this one day.
Don’t get me wrong: I have four kids. I love motherhood itself. I think it should be celebrated. I’m just not sure Mother’s Day is the way to do so.
The founder of Mother’s Day came to hate her own holiday. In 1908, Anna Jarvis started a celebration for her own mother. She crusaded for the idea to spread and Congress recognized it in 1914 as an official holiday.
A few years later, disgusted by the way the greeting-card industry had made a commercial spectacle of it, she smeared them in a press release and spent the remainder of her life trying to cancel her own idea.
I have nothing personal against flowers, chocolate-covered strawberries (my own mother’s favorite) and day-at-the-spa gift cards. I’ll enjoy my kids’ handmade cards and a lovely day with them. If your mom asks for a lovely brunch, by all means take her. I’m not begrudging a token of thanks dad conjures up on behalf of his kids while hoping he gets it right for her sake.
But setting aside one day to honor mothers — or fathers, for that matter — and treating it like it’s the mom version of Christmas is a bit like suggesting that parents honor their children only on their birthdays or spouses show their love only on their anniversary.
When you put it that way, it sounds silly.
Some endeavors in life are so important that a day to honor them isn’t sufficient — especially if that day is filled with tokens of bedazzled commercialism. (Take this Roger Vivier Gift Box Set at $1,595.) Parenting is one of those ventures.
The average mother works almost 100 hours a week. If she could get paid for her myriad of roles, including therapist, chef, Uber driver, academic adviser, psychiatrist, nurse, housekeeper and more, she’d make nearly $180,000 a year.
This is nothing compared to the all-encompassing physical, emotional, and psychological nature of the job. From the time she gives birth or adopts, there is not a human being on the earth whom she could love more or for whom she would sacrifice more.
For some 6,500 days of a child’s life, a mother will clean up vomit, dab boo-boos, teach a child how to use the bathroom and bathe, to read and write, to say please and thank you — and, importantly, she’ll say no.
In the early years, she’ll exert herself more physically in the early years, constantly feeding, wiping, zipping. Later on, parenting becomes more mental. She will now give her analysis, her car keys, her $20 bills, her lectures, her phone, her prayers – dear God, all the prayers towards heaven — that somehow this human God gave her to raise becomes a kind, intelligent, productive member of society despite their snark and messy room.
She will wake in the night with them and get up early for them and pick them up at rowdy parties, no questions asked. She will press them to learn, to study, to be kind and do good, to grow a backbone. It will be too much most days and never enough for these tiny humans.
So, one day a year doesn’t come close to recognizing the gargantuan thing she is trying to do, one she would do without so much as a single rose or piece of chocolate in return.
This Mother’s Day, go ahead, take your mother to dinner and send her a beautiful bouquet. But don’t forget about her the other 364 days of the year.
Every one of those days, she thinks about you.
