Things that Don’t Go Away – Mother’s Day by Sarah Zettel

WARNING: This column is bitter. If you’re not in the mood, you may want to click away now.

I hate Mother’s Day.

     I love my son. Being his mother is the one thing I do that makes me laugh every day. My child is smart, strong, sensitive and in all ways amazing (and did I mention although only in 1st grade he’s in the 3rd grade reading group?). My husband loves me with passion, tenderness, respect and honesty.

     I just hate Mother’s Day a little worse every year.

     To be a mother in America is to be told you suck. There is a multi-billion dollar industry built around making you feel inadequate and insecure so that you will continue to buy “improving” products, parenting magazines, self-help books and gym memberships. But no matter how much you buy, it’s never enough, because the storm never stops, not in terms of the contradictory advice or the guilt hammer coming down from every aspect of the media and advertising industry.

     You, as an American mother quite literally cannot do anything right. If you work outside the home, you’re neglecting your children. If you stay home, you’re smothering them. If you stay in a bad marriage, you’re endangering them. If you get out of a bad marriage, you’re depriving them of the most important relationship in their lives, which is with their Daddy. If you don’t get married at all, you’re an immoral slut and you’re depriving your child of the most important relationship of their lives. If you let them play outside, they’ll get kidnapped by pedophiles. If you don’t let them play outside, you’re depriving them of the best part of childhood. Home school them and you’re a religious nutcase. Let them go to public school and they’ll become druggie burn-outs. Send them to private school and they’ll become effete, spoiled, over-entitled brats.

     Let your kid play video games and you are ruining his literacy and giving him premature carpal tunnel. Don’t let your kid play video games and you’re a hard-ass and interfering with his socialization. Let your kid eat candy and you’re going to make them obese and probably make them get diabetes. Don’t let them each candy and you’re depriving them and they’ll hate you forever. If you’re too strong, you’ll make your son gay and your daughter screwed up. If you’re too weak, you’ll make your son a mamma’s boy and your daughter screwed up. Why was Howard Hughes so messed up? The movie makes it clear. He didn’t have an organic illness, oh no. Watch the first scene. His mother touched him inappropriately and made him afraid of germs. His MOTHER gave him schizophrenia.

     In fact, the general conclusion of literature and the media seems to be that the best thing you can do is give birth and die. You will notice that the histories of TV and movies are filled with single fathers, but next to no single mothers, except for The Karate Kid, One Day at a Time and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Admittedly, that fatherless child was an annoying know-it-all wuss who endangered the ship on a regular basis, but we mothers have to take what we can get.

     Now, I’m an intelligent, educated woman. I’ve studied the media. Heck, I’m a part of the media. I’m a second- generation feminist and a committed progressive. If anybody was able to reject this bombardment, you’d think it would be me. But I couldn’t. Not for years. I worried desperately, constantly, that every little thing I did was going to in some way hurt my child. He was so small, so precious, so fragile, and I was TOTALLY responsible for him. Oh, sure, there was his Dad, but I was his MOTHER and all the images, all the articles, all the messages constantly informed me how I am the sole living being responsible for every aspect of his health and well-being, including in not putting myself forward too much so that he can have a strong relationship with his father.

     I’m not exaggerating. According to a number of constellations in the advice-giving universe, I’m totally responsible for the creation of a healthy relationship between two other human beings. They have nothing to do with it. It’s all up to me.

     And incidentally, has no one stopped to think about what this all says about men that women are required to organize and oversee their emotional lives as well as their physical lives?

     You know what finally ended this madness? I shut it off. I stopped reading the parenting magazines. Actually, I stopped looking for any kind of advice in print. I flash-forward through commercials like they are contagious. I pay attention to my son, and I see he is healthy, he is growing, and he is happy. It took discipline, and I still have terrible relapses into guilt and worry, but finally, finally, I have been able to work my way up to believing I’m probably an okay mother.

     So, after inflicting this kind of damage, once a year, it all turns around and the media and corporations tell me when our family sits down to brunch in an overcrowded restaurant with the mandated bouquet of flowers and a piece of jewelry that it demonstrates how much mothers are really honored, and appreciated, and deserve to be.

     Please. Just…please.

     Do you want to celebrate Mother’s Day? Don’t wait for the appointed day. Go now, and talk to her. Say thank you. Tell her you’re doing okay and she’s done just fine and will continue to do just fine. Tell her you love her, not with flowers or candy or any other corporately approved gift. Just say it. I guarantee you, one honest compliment, one moment of assurance that everything is really all right with you and your world, will be worth more to her than all the pink swag in existence. Then maybe you could do the dishes and a load of laundry and a little vacuuming in the bargain, because you know what? She really does work hard, and the odds are really, really good that somewhere inside she is afraid she has not done a good enough job.

     So, in case after all this, anyone wants to know what I am doing for Mother’s Day — we’ve gotten a baby-sitter and are going out to see the new Star Trek, and staying out of any and all eating establishments.

     Happy Sunday. See you next week.

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About Jay Tomio

...Jay Tomio is the co-owner of BSCreview and BSCkids--check out Jan-ken-pon, his time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column. More fun awaits at the Vogue Immunity