WHY I HATE AND LOVE MOTHER'S DAY

Earlier today, Mother’s Day, 2015, I sat with my mother, Beverly, who is in her 70’s, and other family members, at a table at a posh resort in the Coachella Valley, one of the most prestigious vacation destinations in the world. If you’d have happened to pass by our table, you would have seen a family celebrating Mother’s Day 2015 with joy, love, at an all-around happy gathering. We had cards, we had flowers, we had balloons, we had smiles, and it was all genuine. I truly have enjoyed Mother’s Day this year.

But earlier today, I read an essay called “Why I Hate Mother’s Day” by Anne Lamott, and I instantly felt a twinge of recognition and solidarity, and, judging by how many likes there were at the bottom of her story, and how many times I’ve seen this story shared on Facebook in the last few days, millions of other women can also relate. I applauded Lamott, for her usual courage and humor in writing honestly about feelings and experiences that so many women have, but feel unable to speak of, let alone even admit to. 

I applaud Lamott, especially for her honesty. It’s the first time I’ve seen an article like this that speaks to one of the core emotional truths about this yearly May motherhood charade. Because, you see, I have always secretly and self-ashamedly hated Mother’s Day, too. 

Until now.

Now, I don’t just hate Mother’s Day. Now, to my great surprise, I love Mother’s Day, too. I hate Mother’s Day, and I love Mother’s day, because in a world of deadlines and punctuality, where honest feelings are to be hugely avoided where displaying our true emotions is regarded as a sign of weakness, Mother’s Day is a holiday that makes me feel. 

Mother's Day is like the powerful, paradox of the yellow, rose-like blossoms emerging from the bulbous limbs of the desert's prickly-pear cactus, right in time for this maternal holiday: something beautiful and rare, right in the heart of something - the finely-fuzzed thorn pads on the prickly pear -  that can cause great and lingering pain if you don't handle it carefully and with great respect. And I don't know anyone who lives in the desert who hasn't had an unpleasant encounter with a prickly pear cactus at one time or another. 

And as I stare in awe at a prickly pear in my desert garden this Mother's Day, stunned again at how these perfect flowers co-exist within the unkindnesses of the prickly pear, perhaps even thriving on them, I feel a lot of things, some of them unpleasant and some of them wonderful.  Mother’s Day triggers for me, and so many other women, and maybe even a lot of men, a lot of feelings and memories that make our hearts hurt. 

But for all its artifice and overload of flower fragrances, and for all of its tendency to force upon so many of us an overload of “mother” memories and losses and strained relationships and desires that we’d rather not think about, there’s a lot that matters to it all. There’s a lot more that matters, to Mother’s Day, beneath all the commercialism, sentimental greeting cards, and cutesy fluff. And here’s where I want to dig in a little more.

For years, most of my adult life to date, I have hated Mother’s Day. I’ve not only hated it, but I’ve completely lost my shit, year after year, when it came around. My daughter Tarah can tell you how many Mother’s Days have sent me into an emotional tailspins, or how many times she has threatened to nominate me for Drama Queen Mom-of-the-Year on Mother’s Day. There’s the year I threw all the boxes of cereal in the pantry against the kitchen wall, and there is, to my great shame, the year I sent dishes breaking against that very same wall.

And we won’t even mention the time I threatened to run away from home on Mother’s Day the year Tarah turned 11, or the time I had a meltdown and stormed out of a fancy family brunch in Palm Springs in front of 14-year-old Tarah, and my own mother. Year after year, pretty much since I became a mother, the holiday of Mother’s Day has tended to bring out the worst in me. I can only hope that Tarah forgives me, and I think she has.

But the truth is, I never really fully understood it myself. 

I’ve hated myself for not being able to properly commemorate Mother’s Day, to be able to just sit back, enjoy the flowers, nibble on savory omelettes cooked by professional chefs, and happily sip bubbly mimosa from fluted stemware, let alone just keep myself from falling apart. After all, I’ve reminded myself every year, I have a beautiful daughter, surely one of the biggest gifts in my life, and a widely-beloved mother who is still alive. What the hell, I have repeatedly asked myself, is my problem?

Every Mother’s Day, Tarah has showered me with love and gifts, as has my own mother, and even, year after year, one of my own brothers. I’m not the kind of mom or daughter who expects a Mother’s Day gift, or to be treated any differently than on any other day of the year. Because I dislike sentimentality, I could easily live without Mother’s Day, but on the other hand, I’m always happy to receive flowers and cards, just as I was always happy to get home-made pancakes and gifts made by Tarah during her elementary school years, in spite of my tendencies towards meltdowns and malaise. Today, I was beyond joyed to get a “Happy Mother’s Day” phone call from Tarah and 21-month-old Baby Simon.

There is a dark side to Mother’s Day for everyone, let’s face it. I have so many friends trying to conceive, who aren’t able to have their own babies, or who have miscarried, or even lost a child to death, and my heart hurts for them. I have so many friends who have lost their own beloved mothers far too soon, and my heart hurts for them, too. I have friends who may have chosen to not have children, in their younger years, and now crave the comfort of having young adult children, as they themselves face their aging years alone.

And I have friends who are in middle age who are pained by Mother’s Day, understandably, because it invalidates their own choice to not have children; it makes them feel they are somehow not as worthy, in the social scheme of things, as their sisters who have chosen to be mothers. And also, Mother’s Day tends to reinforce, for many women, their own lack of worthiness as women and mothers and daughters in a society that places so much pressure on all of us to be perfect, especially in our roles as mothers and daughters.

I have friends who are mothers who are estranged from their own children, and I have countless friends whose relationships with or memories of their mothers are painful and fraught with road kill, to put it mildly. Today, on Facebook, I saw Mother’s Day postings that made my smile – the picture of friends who are celebrating their first special day as new moms – and postings that made me cry – the picture of a friend sitting by his mother’s gravestone. There is no one who can experience a perfect Mother’s Day. For all of us, this can be quite a rough bag of tricks. And it’s unavoidable, like all of our other major holidays, even if you try.

My own Mother’s Day issues may be somewhat unique for me, but I’m certain other women can identify. For one, Mother’s Day has always triggered a subconscious reminder that I have another child out in the world who I’ve never known, the progeny of a teenage pregnancy that almost killed me so many years ago and that I was coerced by guilt and shame to place up for adoption. 1980 was another time, and teen pregnancy was not as widely accepted as it is now. Mother’s Day was also, for so many years, a pained and infuriating reminder for me at how hard it was to be a single mother, something I didn’t sign up for.

A lot of my rage, I realize now, came from my frustration with my daughter’s father, who has been incarcerated for most of her lifetime; rage at him for not being there for she or I, and rage at him for his lack of financial support, stemming from his lack of functionality. I also know that I had a lot of anger at my mother for so many years, because she was so emotionally inaccessible to me, although physically present; our relationship was strained, at best, until recently, when I started to fully understand how overwhelmed she was by my demanding father and a family of four born-too-close-together children, not to mention the death of her own mother (when my mom was only 32 years old), but for many years, I carried a lifetime of abandonment issues and resentments because of it. 

Finally, there’s the strong feelings I couldn’t shake, when it came to Mother’s Day: that it was a day of hypocrisy, a day to patronize women, as it were, and thank them for doing so much for so little appreciation or praise or monetary compensation. I used to get very, very angry about all of this.

So what’s changed? Why do I now read an essay like Lamott’s, which I cheer for, and identify with in so many ways, but also say, “Wait….!”? I hate Mother’s Day. But now, miraculously, serendipitously, I also love Mother’s Day. I hate it because it feels contrived, and because it makes me feel so much that is so ambiguous. 

But I love it now, too, because it’s now an incentive for me to take a close look at my life in a wider context, and see that the tricky territory of Mother’s Day doesn’t have to control how I feel. It is going to make me feel things, no getting around it, but now, I somehow have found the grace, as I realize that I have a finite number of Mother’s Days left to live through – perhaps through the promised wisdom of my new middle age – to fully embrace this holiday, for all its good and bad.

This year, I hate Mother’s day and I love Mother’s Day. I have laughed a little bit, and I’ve cried a little bit, too, for myself and for women (and men) and sons and daughters and love and loss everywhere. I choose to savor Mother’s Day now in all its bittersweet, not wanting to miss a beat, and somehow, I feel more complete than I ever thought I would. This Mother's Day is, for me, so full. It's so bittersweet and full of the ripe nutrients of life, like the chunk of pomegranate on my plate from today's buffet. 

And so, I choose to face this traditionally difficult day head-on this year, and in doing so, I surprise myself when I find rays of joy mixed in with the pain, and see how the net of motherhood in my life continues to expand; I'm in the middle of three generations of a still-living mother-child chain; I'm both mother and daughter and mother to a daughter who I now see in the role of mother. And all of this is something to be savored, for all its ups and downs. 

And on this Mother's Day, I find a stunning yellow flower, so beautiful it melts my heart, beaming up at me from a cactus plant I know better than to touch or get too close to, because it will bite back; these are things I must admire respectfully and with care.  And I know what I must do today: water the prickly pear, even against the odds of the thorns that challenge me, and enjoy its delicious offering.