If you are having a happy Mother’s Day, this diary is not for you.
The whole rest of U.S. culture is for you today.
All the happy happy messages and photos and cards and reminders are for you. Enjoy your mom, enjoy your children, and have a very lovely day!
This diary is for the rest of us.
If you have never thought about this before, you may be surprised to know that there are a LOT of people for whom Mother’s Day is hard. One of the hardest days on the calendar. Just something we hope we get through with as little trouble as possible.
And yet at the drug store, at the bus stop, at the fast food drive through, at church, at the gas station, and of course on television, everywhere everywhere everywhere, the automatic assumption that everyone is having a happy Mother’s Day bombards us like getting caught in a sudden spring hail storm sans umbrella.
There have been years I wished I could go away for the day to a country where the holiday is not celebrated. That’s how bad it can get. Sometimes it is all I can to to stop myself from screaming at the cashier who is casually wishing Happy Mother’s Day to me and every one else in the line:
Not everyone is happy! Can’t you *see* that? Look into people's eyes and notice how many of them refuse to meet your gaze when you say those words, or how many of them start to well up with tears. Just give people the same greeting you give on every other day and stop assuming everyone is happy today. You have no idea the deep deep wounds you are sticking your salty fingernail into with your glib greeting.
But of course I say nothing. Or mumble “yes, Happy Mother’s Day to you, too” as I take my receipt quickly and go.
Sometimes the ones who are particularly inept at reading people will try to chirpily attempt to draw me into conversation. I guess I have that kind of face.
So what are your plans? Are your children doing anything special for you? Are you taking your mom out to dinner?
When I am feeling like the kind of hurt person who wants to lash out, I tell them the truth. I have no children. My mother is dead. This is a hard and lonely day for me. Happy now?
But usually I spare their feelings and hide my own. “No, just a quiet day today. Taking it easy at home is more my speed.”
When I work with seminary students who are learning the basics of parish life and pastoral care, I always instruct them that this day, like all holidays, has a double edge. Don’t preach a sermon that assumes everyone is having a happy Hallmark holiday. Don’t make all the mothers stand, or give a gift only to mothers, leaving everyone else out.
When i first arrived at my current church they had a tradition that the Men’s Fellowship gave a flower or small potted plant to all the mothers on Mother’s Day.
It had never occurred to anyone that this was exclusionary in a way that might be hurtful.
Now we observe the flower tradition that includes everybody. If you are a mother, you receive or wear a pink flower. If you are not a mother, you receive/wear a red flower if your mother is alive and a white flower if your mother is not. (If you don’t know whether your mother is alive or not, you can choose which color you would rather display.) Sometimes we acknowledge the people wearing white flowers for the first year, those who are in their first year of grieving, and then acknowledge the new mothers, wearing pink flowers for the first year, affirming that life follows death.
So if you are one of those people who goes down a different aisle to avoid seeing the Mother’s Day cards and candy, or stands in front of the cards with anger or tears that there is no card to express your complicated situation, please know that there is someone out here who knows about the moments that the words don’t reach.
It has taken the culture quite a while to realize that some people are really sad at Christmas time, but now “Blue Christmas” services are no longer rare. Multicultural awareness stops people from automatically assuming everyone is having a Merry Christmas or celebrating Christmas at all.
And for some reason there is more widespread acknowledgment that a lot of people have trouble with Father’s Day.
But Mother’s Day is still assumed to be a universally shared holiday. That’s just the baseball hot dogs apple pie and Chevrolet world we live in.
Go ahead, call me unreasonable. Say I’m the one out of step and shouldn’t expect the rest of the culture to accommodate me. Fine. But I believe there are more of us than you think who are having a hard day today, just keeping our heads down until it is over.
Below is the handout I share with the pastoral care students.
A partial list of people who are not happy on Mothers Day:
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people who have (or had) horrible relationships with their mothers
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people raised by someone other than their mother (who did not treat them well)
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people who do not know who their birth mother is, and wish they knew
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people who do not know where their mother is and/or whether she is alive
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people whose mother neglected them
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people whose mother abused them physically or sexually
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people grieving the recent death of their mother
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people grieving the death of their mother a long time ago
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people grieving deaths that occurred on/near Mother's Day
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people separated from their mother by great distance who wish they could be together
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people separated from their mother by estrangement
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mothers separated from their children by distance or estrangement
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mothers whose children are in prison or institutional care
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mothers who do not know where one or more of their children are
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mothers who lost children in custody battles
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mothers whose children died young
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mothers whose children died at any age
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mothers whose children committed suicide
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mothers whose children are seriously ill or near death
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foster mothers who are blocked from keeping their foster children permanently
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women who have experienced miscarriage
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women who gave up children for adoption and wonder where those children are
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women who felt pressured into having abortions they did not want to have
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women with fertility problems longing for children despite repeated failure to conceive
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women in a long/complicated/frustrating adoption process waiting to receive a child
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women past childbearing age who never had the chance to have children
These people are not happy on Mother's Day.
Wishing them a happy Mother’s Day will not make them happy.
Wishing them a happy Mother’s Day may cause/add to pain and sadness.
I myself am in three of these categories.