A Card-Carrying Hater of Mother’s Day
by RANDY SCOTT HYDE
May 03, 2013 at 6am
Card makers love Mother’s Day. They go ape shit over the holiday. And buying their paper greetings is like family brawls at Thanksgiving – it’s just what you do. But I’m not one of those people who can pick out any old card. A mother and son on a bicycle built for two with a sunflower in the basket and some sappy rhyming poem just isn’t my style. Words have power, and I have to really mean the card, so Mother’s Day puts me in a panic. I stand there for ages reading them all, going through each and every subcategory – Mothers From Us, Religious Mothers, Humorous Mothers. There is no easy way to find a card that hits just the right note because for all of these subcategories, there’s never one for Sucky Mothers.
So I go through all of them to find the least offensive and the least dishonest one, which is usually a blurry picture of some nondescript lady on a swing that says, “Enjoy your day. You deserve it.” OK, sure, I can get behind that. Everyone deserves the right to enjoy a day every now and then, right? I mean people aren’t evil all the time. And no one’s making cards yet that say the truth in these kinds of situations: “Hey mom, thanks for giving birth to me, then sucking me into your crazy, and then leaving me to fend for myself while missing every single one of my milestones until you decided to come back with even more crazy and pretend like nothing ever happened in hopes that I might take care of you in your old age.” No, I can never find that card, so the anemic one will have to do.
While friends are buying the super-cheery pastel greetings and planning their sunny Sunday brunches, I’m grumbling through the card aisle for two hours. But this is the silent contract my mother and I made, and if two hours of bad poetry reading keeps her off my back for a while, I will do it.
I think more than most holidays, Mother’s Day comes with a ton of assumptions. Everyone loves their mother, right? Everyone has one, and even if yours has her faults, she’s still your mother and you should cherish her. This archetype of the wise, loving, salt-of-the-earth mom who abides by the sacredness of motherhood takes over on this particular day. Even if you have issues with the woman who gave birth to you, most put those feelings aside in celebration of the good parts. But there’s another side to the mother archetype – the Devouring Mother, the selfish, enslaving mother who will eat your soul alive if you let her – and she gets swept under the rug. For those of us who only have the Devouring Mother, Mother’s Day is really tough.
Mommy Dearest
OK, I’m being harsh. My mom isn’t all bad. When I was really little, I remember her teaching me how to make necklaces out of clover and how to build a pile of leaves high enough to land safely in when pretending to fly. And she’s hilarious. When she’s not drowning in a pity pool, she’s probably the funniest person I know. But my mother’s faults aren’t something you can easily sidestep. They rule her life. Her temper is a thing of legend, and combined with a love of violent men, has caused her to make some really bad decisions, including giving me up to my grandparents at the age of nine.
Since I left for college in ’92, I’ve probably seen her a handful of times, but we talk on the phone about once a month – these stifled conversations where we both pretend everything is OK and nothing ever happened. But as I get older, these lies are harder to perpetuate, and my mother is aware that my interest in this charade is dying.
She tries to keep me in the game with little tests: “If I had cancer, would
you care?” Or, “Call me now, my husband upset me and I really need you.” Somehow, I’ve become the parent, needing to reassure her, needing to fill in for her own missed mother or to help ease the guilt that she holds.
Hell, I should get a Mother’s Day card! She’s not a nurturer, she needs nurturing. I know everything about anyone who has pissed her off, intimate details about the workings of her internal organs, and the frequent displays of idiocy she endures with every hospital visit. She’s never asked where I work and can’t name a single one of my friends.
Getting It in Writing
During infrequent moments of honesty, she claims I hate her for leaving me. But in fact, I think it was unintentionally the smartest and kindest thing she’s ever done – as that was a whole other mess of hardship I got to miss. The difficult part, which she can’t understand, is that while it’s true that I dodged one bullet, it doesn’t erase all of the facts that came along with her decision. There are things she wants to hear that I simply cannot say. I can handle lies by omission for the sake of a drama-less phone call, but it’s the barefaced lie where I have to draw the line – to keep some sanity and respect for my history.
And this is where the problem of the dreaded Mother’s Day card comes in. I can never send the normal clichés that thank her for raising me, for being there, for always listening, for healing boo-boos and pinning corsages and other magical nurturing that mothers do. I thank my grandmother for that. But I have tons of compassion for my mother; she had a hard life and still struggles through it. So I can make the concession to get the card, to show some respect for her role in my life, and do one thing that might help ease her pain a bit. But like any good compromise, I have to do it in a way that doesn’t completely suck my soul dry.
It would be nice to use Mother’s Day to celebrate the truth of mothers as people, because they are just people after all and come in all different emotional shapes and dysfunctional sizes. But until someone starts making cards that can get at the truth of some of the complex things we feel about our mothers, you’ll find me sitting on the floor of my local drugstore, pouring through a mountain of cards, looking for the one that politely says nothing.
And don’t even get me started on Father’s Day.