Mothers Day Lament

On the commercialism, capitalism, and emotional manipulation of the day and mothers themselves. The day is a day of capitalist hyperbole.

I had a mother, and she was a reasonably good one. She had her moments like all human beings but her bad moments were fewer than many other mothers I knew. Once my kids were born and she became a Mamóg (never a Grandma, Granny, or Nana - certainly NOT a Nana, just like she was never Mother), once she met my kids, she became a friend as well and was a very good Mamóg.

We had struggles when I was a teenager, mainly brought about by a less than wonderful father, being the eldest of four, the youngest having special educational needs, and poverty. My mother was stressed, by life, by misogyny, by my father, by having four kids, by having to work jobs she didn’t like to help support us all, by living in the middle of nowhere that meant us kids needed ferrying back and forth, by having to look after my Grandma, her mother in law, in her sheltered housing when my father was disinterested, and then watch my father spend £1000s on computer equipment before paying the bills.

She was the accountant in the house, back before the days of internet banking, when you waited for the monthly printed statement land on the doormat in order to do the checks and balances of receipts and cheque book stubs to see how much money was available for the next month. You had to manually budget. She kept a running total in a book, kept every receipt, worked out how much money was left for food each week, paid every bill, put a little money aside for ‘emergencies’ in a place my dad didn’t know about. I watched her every month trying to get the books to balance, trimming here, moving money from there. She sat alone, in the kitchen, at our old pine farmhouse table bought cheaply at an auction that was covered with an old fashioned oil cloth in a beautiful deep burgundy, steadily working away for a good couple of hours. When I was older I watched her, kept her quiet company, listening to the sighs, the grumbles at my father’s spending, the rising bills, wondering how we would afford new school shoes etc.

On one such occasion she was so pissed off at my father she paid a whole year of poll tax¹ for herself, literally threw a cheque book at him, and told him to pay his monthly bill himself. I think she made the point and elicited a ‘rare as unicorn poo’ apology and sorted it out for him going forward. I sort of wish she hadn’t given in.

She was a strong woman, diminutive in stature, barely hitting 5 ft and claiming half an inch that did not exist, but formidable. She suddenly died aged 59 and was replaced quite quickly by the woman I call the evil stepwitch. Never a mother to us and never a granny to my children, a narcissist that made my father abandon my children for knowing my mother. They were nearly 2, 4, and 6 at the time.

So I struggle with having one day a year where people think of their mother or don’t in many cases. Mothers have it hard every day. They take most of the familial load. They deserve every day to be a Mother’s Day.

And of course we are all human, we all muck up, and make mistakes. Some of us are pretty awful mothers. So of us are amazing.

Even the sweet looking woman below had some very irritating traits. There were times when her behaviour totally flummoxed me. There were times when she was totally wonderful. She was human and fallible. As we all are.

So I suppose, what I’m saying is, I dislike this one day where everyone says gushing things about their mothers and makes them all out to be marvellous paragons of virtue who have never ever had a metaphorical hair out of place, and then go back to normal for the rest of the year. The day is a day of capitalist hyperbole.

When my mother died and my step mother came onto the scene, we were required to make a big thing of Mother’s Day. Flowers, a card, a present, a message or phone call. If we didn’t we were castigated in very subtle ways but we knew we were in bother. It didn’t matter what we thought of her, how she treated us, what she did, we needed to capitulate to her whims.

That’s not love. That’s not respect. That’s manipulation.

And that’s what bothers me. We are being manipulated into not being honest, to capitulating to capitalism.

And this also doesn’t take into account those women who have lost children, can’t have children, have estranged children, who don’t want children, who struggle with this day.

Let every day be a day we celebrate every person on this beautiful planet of ours.

That is all, rant over.

1. The Community Charge, commonly known as the poll tax, was a system of taxation introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government in replacement of domestic rates in Scotland from 1989, prior to its introduction in England and Wales from 1990. It provided for a single flat-rate, per-capita tax on every adult, at a rate set by the local authority. The charge was replaced by Council Tax in 1993, two years after its abolition was announced.^[1]