Rough Drafts
A Series of Pieces Written in The Wild
#7
I just sent the text “I keep forgetting it’s Mother’s Day until I go on Instagram and see all the posts about how it’s ok for Mother’s Day to be hard” to my best friend. Mother’s Day is hard for so many reasons and for so many people. In my experience motherhood as I’ve witnessed the practice and as a concept has seemed like a nonstarter for me. I don’t know how to talk about motherhood without thinking that I’m coming off as an asshole. But when motherhood is defined in such rigid terms to the point where all the mothers I saw were struggling within those confines even when they said they were fine, it made me suspicious of the whole thing. As an adult I can recognize that it’s not the mothers or the motherhood that are difficult but systemic issues that make it so. Mother’s Day is hard. It’s also very close to my mother’s birthday so even harder to forget. There was one year I did forget. It was also the year my mother screamed at me for helping my brother’s ex-girlfriend move out of their apartment, uninvited me from my other brother’s wedding, and kicked me off the family phone plan in one fell swoop. I had maybe just gotten a new phone and number when I got the call from my dad, “how dare you not call your mother wahhh wahhh wah wah.” A friend of mine was worried that I had been kidnapped in the days when I was trying to figure out a phone situation. The last thing I cared about was wishing my mother a happy whatever. A lot of these posts about the difficulty of the day are as profound as platitudes can be. Vague enough for anyone with a story to see themselves in them. I used to find comfort in them but I’ve been drawn more to the specificity of my experiences and learning to find the meaning there. Or at least, process some of the pent up anger and grief so I’m not spending so much energy clinging tightly to it anymore. About a month ago I published an episode of my podcast where I spoke about how much I loved my mom. I choked as I admitted knowing that she didn’t know how to love me. That was something I didn’t even know I was holding onto. It hit deep and almost out of the blue.
