My Mother hates Mothers Day. Her assertion has always been that many of these so-called feel-good holidays are just constructs of card companies and retailers designed to make people part with their hard earned money. When we would come home from school with our Mothers Day crafts, remember the clay ash tray with your little hand print in it, my Mother would say, “What the hell am I going to do with that? I don’t smoke.” Her belief was that you should appreciate your parents every day of the year, not just once a year. She’d rather have do our chores and behave ourselves than give her a smarmy greeting card and some cheesy knick-knacks that served no purpose other than to gather dust on the shelf. After my parents split up and she was raising us on her own, she liked Mothers Day sentiments even less. Then one year, instead of giving her a Mothers Day card, we waited and gave her a Fathers Day card instead. That she liked. It was funny and unexpected and came from the heart. No fake sentiment, no conventions, just a genuine attempt to get her to laugh. My Mother is actually much more of a drill sergeant than my Dad and her disciplinary skills were put to good use keeping us all in line by herself. She used to say she had to be tough because she was outnumbered and she was charged with the awesome task of keeping us from killing each other. So to all the single parents out there, doing double duty every single day of the year, it might not seem like it now but many years from now your kids will show you what a great job you really did.
