Can We Talk About Mother's Day? (aka: "Hallmark can go fuck itself - how about that?")

I mean, the thorough undoing and cultural erasing of its original meaning aside, and the subsequent homogenized distillation of the remaining pseudo-sentiment into a concentrated, commercialized Card-Flowers-Brunch trifecta that essentially says “hey, thanks for doing all that non-paid, outdated-gender-role-driven ‘women’s work’” (beginning with the ostensibly most important bit about turning what all the major religions and conservative governments [semantics?] view as “sacred sperm” into one or more screaming kids with loaded diapers)… all that aside it’s all undeniably just a little less tidy and a lot more fucking complicated than the commercials portray.

“MOMMIE NOUN vs. MOMMIE VERB” ~ we all have at least one mother, and the Hallmark playbook says she gets the CFB trifecta. But many of us were raised by someone else: an adoptive mother, a grandmother, a step-mother, a foster-mother, a nun in an orphanage, a nanny… since life never happens in a straight line, odds are if you have more than one mother, you might even have a few. So where’s the greeting card for that? (A minor point; the daughter of the founder of Mother’s Day, Ann Jarvis, denounced the use of greeting cards in the commercialization of Mother’s Day as “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.”)

And what about chosen family? I’m a graduate of the foster-care system and had more service-providers in “parental” roles in the days of my youth than anything that might resemble a cultural portrayal of “family” in the greeting card aisle or on the Disney channel. As an adult, I can now recognize many strong women I’ve looked up to as mothers-of-sorts at different times in my life, but who neither birthed me or “raised” me in a traditionally parental role (paid or unpaid).

The genuine and non-ironic enthusiasm of the “I totally hashtag heart my mom!” set gives me the same feeling I get with the truly faithful, honestly devout church-goers I see gathering in sunlit Sunday afternoons in springtime: genuine admiration wrapped in pure, unadulterated awe, with nary a single iota of an ability to personally relate. The thought of it is lovely, but wholly mind-bending in a Carl-Sagan-meets-Steven-Hawking way: it’s profoundly difficult to imagine such connections really for real exist.

It seems to me like bona fide leprechaun-unicorn-shooting-star-Willy-Wonka-lottery-winning luck if you actually for real have one single mother in your life who birthed you and then remained a positive constant in your life to raise you in a way that you can genuinely feel thankful about. Or if the mom or mother-figure you had didn’t birth you, but still raised you in a way you appreciate with non-ironic gratitude, that’s a rarity right up there with opening a chocolate bar and seeing the gold glint of a ticket to a magical chocolate factory you’ll own before dinner. It seems to me that for genuine truths like this, a million CFB trifectas drenched heavily with the finest artisanal fares and floral wares couldn’t even begin to bestow a worthy enough honour.

MOMMIE DEAREST ~ “the creative adult is the child who survived.” Any kid who grew up with a mother who for whatever reason just categorically failed at the parenting thing gets this. At the very least we hope to make it to adulthood with minimal damage to our souls and psyches, but in our world that is the ultra-rare golden ticket we’d feel incredulous luck to have drawn. Usually, our childhood experiences render any combination of narcissism, untreated mental ill health, physical abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, violence, alcoholism/drug addiction, garden variety neglect… and all the three-ring clusterfuck consequences – situational, psychological and psychiatric – that result.

Whether the toxic dysfunction we grew up with was an unfortunate consequence of shitty micro- or macro-circumstance (insert gender analysis and/or colonial discourse studies here), or just the genetic lottery giving us a mother who for no particular reason at all simply epitomizes douchesnozzel-cunty-horribleness – it doesn’t actually matter.

At the end of the day, what needed to happen didn’t, and/or what shouldn’t have happened totally fucking did. The cultural push to “love and honour your mother today” doesn’t land overly well with all the adults gifted with the lifelong, complex impacts of traumatic childhood adversity topped with the cherry of moms who, for whatever reason, weren’t able to or otherwise just didn’t give a fuck.

So every year on Mother’s Day, I make sure to raise my glass and give a heartfelt toast to all the adult kids who survived a horrible mother (or mothers), and I take a solemn moment to say a prayer for all the kids (grown or not) who presently continue to suffer beneath the Hallmark wrappings and trappings – many less visibly than others. My Dearest kindred souls-in-bloom: you are wired for struggle, you will survive, and you are not alone.

STIGMATIZED MOMMIES ~ and then there are the moms who are vilified because they just don’t fit the accepted cultural norms of what “good mommyhood” is or should be. In my line of work, I speak with these moms every single day: moms in jail, moms in psychiatric wards, moms on drugs, moms with acute alcohol addiction (the kind where you’re drinking hand sanitizer to cope), moms whose kids have been apprehended into government care.

Stigma and lateralized oppression being what they are, moms living with any degree of socioeconomic disadvantage will be judged and/or vilified by even other moms who aren’t. Maybe it’s just the devoutly Catholic mom who judges you for ensuring a one way ticket to hell for your child by not having them baptized. Or it’s the hipster mom who loathes your willingness to exist with so few tattoos and piercings, and to raise your children so crushingly mainstream. And there’s also this ever-growing Gwyneth Paltrow "Goop"-inspired set who simply cannot imagine why any decent woman would subject her precious children to anything less than homegrown, triple-certified organic food and filtered glacial water flown in from the purest alpine lake in Geneva, 3000 thread-count unbleached and fairly-traded silk-blend clothing, and a comprehensive homeschool curriculum developed by child psychologists and spiritual gurus hailing from the finest institutions in Europe and India. And world travel, because full cultural immersion in other countries is the very best way to learn about the world – obviousleh. (Although in fairness to the GP set, they fucking judge everyone in equally fierce, pretentiously privileged measure).

And don’t even get me started on the culturally fabricated and perpetuated “mommy wars” thing. All. Mothers. Are. Working. Mothers. - whether they choose or need to maintain employment outside the home or not. Gah.

I also think of all those moms who either hit that cultural ‘madonna/whore’ jackpot (moms who engage in consensual sex-work and/or who enjoy a healthy sex life with one or more partners), or who are simply judged or vilified because of who they are, the colour of their skin and/or where their genetic/geographical lottery landed them. As I write this I find myself wondering if the pseudo-religious, child-abusing-culty-polygamists do Mother’s Day (hashtag confusing! They’d need a seriously large chart to graph exactly who’s who to who in the genogram zoo.) Whether the radicalized Mormon sets do or don’t, I acknowledge the mothering that happens in their and every kind of sociological sphere (patriarchal hellscape or otherwise) as much as I do any other kind of mothering anywhere else.

CHOICE ~ I’ve joked for years about my sincere astonishment regarding the folks in the world who plan pregnancies with the same organizational prowess as it takes to plot a comprehensive itinerary for a six-week vacation abroad. I personally fall into the tribe of women who roll with pregnancies of the generally unplanned, more surprisingly-fated sort, and the menu in this regard remains timelessly cut-and-dry simple:

1. having an abortion

2. having and then relinquishing the baby for adoption

3. having and keeping the baby

Whether you choose to air your deets publicly or not, this basic menu has the objective permanence of time and space. And to this day, I promise you that any choice you make guarantees judgmental wrath from somewhere, be it the pious fundamentalists, the moral majority or the merely righteously judgmental. Someone somewhere absolutely will have – and likely share – a scathingly opinionated lecture for you about your soul, your character, your life, what you should have done but clearly didn’t, and what you ought to do but obviously won’t.

At this point in my own life, I’ve at one time or another chosen all three menu items and I can state with authority that as girls and women, with respect to this and any other gender-specific menu, we’re pretty much fucked and viciously judged either way. This seems to be a quite universal, timeless fact.

So let’s remember the mothers who choose not to follow through with motherhood, for whatever reason, and at any time. The anti-choice proponents insist life begins at conception, so why doesn’t motherhood? Does one only get the sacred “mother” label post-birth? I say nay.

In the Judgement of Solomon story, the woman who retracts her claim to the other in order to protect her child is universally viewed as epitomizing motherly selflessness. So why is abortion and/or adoption still such a vilifying taboo when it comes to the mom who is making these particular (and usually incredibly painful) choices? I say motherly selflessness counts even if the outcome doesn’t include the screaming kid with the loaded diaper.

LOSS & BEREAVEMENT ~ Mother’s Day is replete with bereaved loss, for both adults and children whose mothers are deceased. And for mothers who have lost a child at any time – during pregnancy or after.

And for many, bereavement has no final, specific answer that can be wrapped around the pain. I lost my first child to coerced adoption. Years ago, a therapist explained to me that the loss for birth mothers is psychologically identical to the loss experienced by someone whose child dies – with the single exception that the parents who grieve a deceased child live with certain knowledge of what happened.

And so on Mother’s Day I remember the too many missing women and girls. The too many missing children, and all the mothers who hold hope against hope, for weeks, days, months and years.

I remember all the mothers who are separated from their children because of painful, complicated circumstance – insidious or otherwise. Sometimes stigma and shame are so deeply entrenched that it is hard to even whisper the truth. It’s taken me over twenty years to be able to speak mine, and I’m grateful I’ve been able to get there. There are so very many women who are never able to. There are so many mothers out there who won’t or can’t even identify as mothers, because the fear of vilification is immense and the pain of a mere whisper of their truth makes suppression the easier choice.

Stigma, vilification and the fluid, often subjective degrees of privilege that are their counterparts; loss and bereavement and all those less-cheery aspects that our sound-byte culture necessarily excludes, omits, suppresses and oppresses in favor of  a homogenized cultural pablum, and driven by the singular corporate goal of spiking consumerism for a  single day... I know I am not alone in acknowledging that motherhood is anything but a one-dimensional construct that can be tidily encapsulated in a 30-second commercial or a greeting card platitude.

On Mother’s Day I honour and invite remembrance for it all.