Arrowleaf and Mom's Day

Every April, the Okanagan Valley turns yellow as the arrowleaf balsamroot plant busts out all over the place, brightening our trails and hillsides. No matter what’s going on in the world, it’s impossible not to feel happy, or at least happier, when the arrowleaf blossoms are everywhere, announcing spring and causing an outbreak of smiles, of oohs and ahas. I can’t stop taking pictures of them. Just when I tell myself I have enough for this year, I’ll see another patch that begs to be photographed. The arrowleaf blossoms don’t last long, only about a month, but they’re usually still blooming when May rolls around, bringing with it, Mom’s Day. I live far away from all three of my adult children. The only thing I ever want on Mother’s Day is to hear all their voices. And I did yesterday. Last night, I went to sleep feeling all warm inside.

The topic of Mother’s Day is a chapter in my second book, A Year of Days, published ten years ago now, back in 2015. It’s a collection of personal essays about the various special days of each year. This year, as I edited my dozens of arrowleaf photos, my Mother’s Day essay kept popping into my head. Now that the day is done for another year and my words can’t intrude on anyone’s immediate enjoyment of the annual maternal celebration, I offer an abridged version of it here. I’ve updated it a bit, taken out references to things like magazines lying around the house and making postings to Twitter (I don’t read many physical magazines any more and the less said about Twitter the better). But the guts of my ten-year-old essay are essentially the same because my feelings about the day have not changed. It’s a bit longer read than my usual postings, so settle in with your favourite beverage.

I didn’t want to write about Mother’s Day. As I looked for my mother in the annual occasions we’d spent with and without each other over the years, I took a linear approach and went down my list of special days month by month. Every time I reached May, I wanted to skip over Mother’s Day and go directly to the May long weekend. Not because I didn’t have anything to say about Mother’s Day, but because I was certain that I wouldn’t like the process of wrestling whatever I had to say into a cohesive assortment of words.

Every time I steered myself to my writing chair to tackle the topic, all my delay tactics went into activation mode. My body veered away from my desk. My dialing hand pulled me towards the telephone, certain that I had to make next year’s dentist appointment in that very moment. That task complete, my email inbox demanded my attention. That held my attention for almost a whole minute, but my legs still would not take me to my desk. There was only one thing to do. Go outside. On a long walk I let my mind wander, encouraged my gut to relax. Cool air made the muscles on my face feel alert as my brain worked to dispel my resistance. I considered the notion that writing about an annual spring celebration would be an invigorating experience.

I began to compose an opening sentence and then an opening paragraph for an essay on Mother’s Day. But as soon as I was back inside my house, my legs took me to the kitchen, where I sat down to write out a grocery list. The next thing I knew I was re-organizing my spice drawer. When that pressing task was finished, I stood back to admire my work, pleased to see all the jars in their new positions, arranged alphabetically from allspice to thyme. I added cinnamon to my grocery list.

List-making is sometimes a good springboard into writing. I jot down words and phrases, number them, put them in a logical order, and imagine them as an outline for something yet unknown. Once my list was finished, I decided that the writing was messy, so messy it required re-doing. This is an annoying habit of mine. My lists must be neat. If they’re messy, I lose interest in them. On a fresh sheet of paper, I precisely printed each letter, as if performing calligraphy.

I didn’t want to write about Mother’s Day because since becoming a mother I had grown to dislike it. A lot. This admission will no doubt cause eyebrows to raise and foreheads to furrow, especially on the faces of other mothers. I might as well proclaim that I don’t like clean air or puppies. (I like both those things.) My antipathy towards Mother’s Day gained traction slowly over the years, not unlike the process that enables the spread of lichen on granite or barnacles on a humpback whale.

I eventually did get myself into my writing chair that day. I remember it well. It was mid-afternoon when I finally plunked my butt down onto the cushioned seat and opened my laptop. After I’d stretched out my hands and my wrists, my wayward fingers betrayed me as soon as they touched the keyboard. They wanted to check my email and update my Facebook status. In moments like that, I tell myself that it’s better to satisfy those urges than resist them, otherwise they get in my way, like itches that need scratching. After completing those chores, my fingers took me to You Tube, where I watched the original video of John Lennon’s “Imagine” several times and wondered if I’d reached my one hundredth viewing yet. My favourite part was still when John and Yoko magically disappear through the front door of the big white house.

By three o’clock that afternoon, it was apparent that I had to trick myself out of my procrastination. Still on You Tube, I typed in the words “Mother’s Day” and found a video of two brothers taking a picture of themselves as a present for their mother, one all dressed up, the other wearing a t-shirt with the word “TOOL” on it. The dressed-up brother insists that the Tool brother put a tie on. When the Tool brother returns with a yellow tie around his neck, he is still wearing the “TOOL” shirt. The dressed-up brother punches him and the fight is on. Two minutes of hilarity later, I was at least thinking about Mother’s Day. But my fingers on the keyboard were still not trustworthy, so I decided to start the writing process by hand. With that, my body took me off on a hunt for the perfect pencil and the ideal pad of paper. My treasure chest of procrastination techniques is bottomless.

Despite my discomfort about Mother’s Day, I willingly honoured my own mother each year, not elaborately, usually with a card and a phone call, perhaps some flowers. The usual. I wasn’t original in buying Mother’s Day presents for my mom. I took the easy way out. But I also know that my mom enjoyed receiving these typical gestures on Mother’s Day. They are what she expected to get.

Before I turned thirty, I’d become mother to three children. Over the years, I’ve given the job of mothering much thought. So much thought that I wrote a dissertation about literary motherhood for my PhD. That academic endeavor in combination with my personal experience allows me to consider myself pretty well informed in my thinking about how motherhood affects women’s lives. Much is made in our world about good mothers versus bad mothers. There is no in-between. Rarely are mothers merely adequate. When it comes to mothering, in the eyes of those watching – and there are many – adequate isn’t good enough. Mothers are good or mothers are bad. Those are the only categories. Quite often the people who label some mothers as bad are other mothers. Mothers monitor mothers. It’s the way of our world. I don’t like it, but it’s what happens. My first instinct was that the reason I don’t like Mother’s Day was because of the judgments too many mothers place on each other.

I can’t remember much about how Mother’s Day unfolded in the house I grew up in. I know we never brought breakfast to Mom in bed. That would have been silly because she wouldn’t have been there. I can’t ever remember my mother still being in bed when I got up. Not only was she up, but her bed was already made. She made it almost as soon as she got out of it, as long as my father wasn’t still in it. To this day, I do the same thing. I can’t think straight if I haven’t made my bed yet and I certainly can’t start working until it’s done. It’s like trying to write while I’m still in my pyjamas. It’s not going to happen. I can’t think when I’m not wearing underwear.

I do have vague recollections of making both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards when I was in elementary school. I also dimly recall Sunday brunches when we made breakfast and served Mom eggs, bacon, and toast at the table. We probably gave her a few small gifts, like a new African violet for the kitchen window or an unburnt set of oven mitts. Then we made her stay in her chair while we cleaned up. But as the afternoon wore on, the sense of Mother’s Day disappeared and soon she was in the kitchen preparing Sunday night’s roast beef dinner as usual.

I knew there had to be more to my Mother’s Day consternation than mothers who judge other mothers. In the face of so much social measuring, most women have learned how to weather this type of pressure. So I looked at how Mother’s Day compares to Father’s Day. Both those days have gained marketing emphasis in recent years, an emphasis that I felt as a push back, a reigning in of women to so-called traditional roles. I studied greeting cards looking for evidence. According to Father’s Day cards, male parents are big and strong, funny and athletic. They throw baseballs and footballs. They give good advice and are manly role models for their children.

Mother’s Day cards are different. The idealization of motherhood is rampant, the greeting cards filled with flourishes and verses about how mothers are always loving and always sweet and always patient and always devoted. Each card seems to carry with it the implicit suggestion that, for women, mothering would and should always be their primary purpose in life.

Mother’s Day both reflects and perpetuates a particular brand of mothering – an impossible standard of someone who is selfless, all-wise, all-sacrificing, ever kind and good. That mother is the only person capable of providing her child with the attention it needs, so she must always be ready to put her own needs aside. That mother makes me want to scream. I don’t think she’s healthy for herself or her children.

While I can’t imagine my life without them, I admit to having days when I wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had children. What would I have done with my years? Where would I have gone? I also admit to some days when I was envious of the freedom my childless friends enjoyed. There were days when I wanted to open the front door and scream into the empty street “But What About Me!” In our current atmosphere of attachment helicopter parenting, I wonder how many of today’s young parents want to scream out those same words but can’t. Someone would call the authorities.

When my mother was alive and could still read, I’d stand in my favourite greeting card store for a long time looking for the right card for this daughter to give to that mother. I shuddered at the florid verse and overwrought descriptions. They were too much, too false. Not because their messages didn’t apply. Some of them did. But my mother was too real to me. She didn’t fit into any of these cards. In the end, I always walked out with the simplest card I could find, one with only three words: Happy Mother’s Day. I could write the rest myself.

Mother’s Day, like Father’s Day, is American made. They both originated early in the twentieth century, in the United States. The first Mother’s Day happened in 1872, organized by Julia Ward Howe, a Massachusetts social activist also known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Howe’s version of Mother’s Day was all about peace. Having seen the violence of the American Civil War, having witnessed the loss of so many sons, Howe envisioned a day for women to convene and discuss ways they could work towards a world without war.

But Howe’s model didn’t catch on. Mother’s Day didn’t become a popular success until 1908 when Anna Jarvis organized a Mother’s Day campaign in West Virginia as a memorial for her own mother. What I like about Anna Jarvis is that she paid attention to the apostrophe in Mother’s Day, insisting that it must indicate the singular possessive (Mother’s) rather than the plural possessive (Mothers’). Yes, I yearn for a world where the majority of people can distinguish between a possessive apostrophe and a contraction apostrophe! But I digress. In Anna Jarvis’s mind, Mother’s Day was meant to be a private celebration between a child and its mother.

Jarvis’s intimate version of a quiet reflective day that honoured the mother-child relationship didn’t last long. Mother’s Day became wildly popular. In fact, her efforts at promoting Mother’s Day resulted in so much success for this new occasion that by the 1920s, Jarvis was unhappy with its capitalistic image. By the time of her death in 1948, she’d spent many years and much of her money campaigning against the commercial version of the day she had created.

Father’s Day came about in response to Mother’s Day. In 1910, in Spokane, Sonora Dodd organized a day to honour her father, a man who’d raised his six children on his own after his wife’s death. But while Mother’s Day became officially recognized merely six years after Anna Jarvis’s initial efforts, Father’s Day wasn’t officially acknowledged until the 1970s. Father’s Day was slow to achieve widespread acceptance because people were suspicious of it and regarded its appearance as an opportunistic commercial endeavour. They resisted what they saw as a transparent marketing tactic launched by manufacturers of neckties and pipes, companies that hoped to increase their profits if Father’s Day grew into the same public success as Mother’s Day. Why they didn’t see this same crass motivation in Mother’s Day is a question for another essay. Despite this slow public acceptance, the merchants and manufacturers did not give up and eventually prevailed as Father’s Day became an annual event on the calendar and a modest commercial success.

Still, Mother’s Day was the runaway winner. Every year, more cards and gifts were purchased for Mother’s Day than for Father’s Day. The reasons for this are unclear and could be several of many. Perhaps their time in the maternal womb leaves children feeling more intimately connected to Mom. Perhaps older and adult children are more comfortable expressing sentiment towards mothers. Perhaps, just maybe, the idealization of motherhood has an ideological (dare I say political) intent to make having children more attractive to young women in a misogynistic world that isn’t going to make it easy for them.

Whatever the reasons, Mother’s Day continues to be a commercial bonanza. But I knew that the commercial idealization of motherhood wasn’t the only source of my discomfort about the day. Many – and hopefully most – people are astute enough to recognize the difference between genuine emotion and obligatory sentimentality, so there had to more to it than that.

I have great empathy for today’s new parents in this fraught world. The amount of pregnancy data, infant development psychology, toddler training, playdates and planned activities, special schooling, and child rearing information available these days is infinite. It’s too much. At the same time, mother angst these days is high, with pressure on appearing to perform the job with perfection off the charts. The result of this situation is that choosing how to mother is fraught with social danger as women wrestle with difficult questions. How do I keep them safe? Do I let them fall and get themselves up? Do I stay home with my children and abandon my own aspirations? Do I risk leaving my babies with someone else? It’s a quandary that has never been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. And it won’t be until the corporate working world acknowledges that parenting is necessary human work for both mothers and fathers and makes room for that philosophy in their rigid business structures. Not for profit. For the social good. After all, it’s the responsibility of society to ensure the viability of the next generation.

In considering the dilemmas facing parents these days, I began to think that my disquiet about Mother’s Day was that there’s no getting away from it. What if, I thought, when it came to Mother’s Day, instead of tying moms to the usual rituals they were offered the whole day to themselves? Instead of making them sit through obligatory brunches in busy restaurants, why not let them have a day to be the people they are outside of being mothers? Let them go hiking or to the library or to the art gallery or on a long bike ride or spend the day watching three movies in a row, bringing them fresh bowls of popcorn when they run out. Not all mothers would take this choice, but what if it were available without repercussions, without guilt that they would actually choose a day to be themselves instead of being feted as Mom? That was it, I thought. That was the source of my unease. On Mother’s Day, mothers have to be the best version of mother.

But my consternation still nagged at me. I felt that I’d missed something. I pored over my notes and went back over the words I’d written. Again and again. I took myself for another long walk. I went to the grocery store and bought toilet paper. I did some yoga. I went back to my computer and watched more You Tube videos. And then it hit me, right in the middle of re-reading my notes on the American origins of Mother’s and Father’s Day. I sat back in my chair and felt my discomfort evaporate. I’d figured out what had been bothering me.

Back in the early twentieth century, when our modern-day versions of these annual celebrations originated with visions from Anna Jarvis and Sonora Dodd, they were modelled on a particular version of family. This was a rigid paradigm based on strictly gendered roles and equally rigorous notions about how children should be raised. Today, some children have three or four parents, while others have only one. Some children have two fathers or two mothers. Some have bedrooms in two homes. Some have no bedroom at all. Some have parents they can’t identify, biological parents from sperm banks or egg donors, parents that have no intention of involvement with their offspring. Others have hands-on, caring adoptive or step-parents who share no genetic connection with their children whatsoever, but love them no less.

Both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are based on outdated models. Here’s my idea: let’s take the gender out of it. Let’s pick a Sunday in between the two current dates, say the last Sunday in May or the first Sunday in June and call it Parents’ Day. Let’s not make any rules – just set the day aside, make it a private day, like Anna Jarvis envisioned, a day to say thanks to all parents, regardless of gender, for the efforts they make every day on behalf of their children. Let’s make it a day that won’t induce inner guilt about falling short of perfection, of not fitting in with a dictated standard. Let’s make it a day that simply recognizes parents for being as good as they can be at an essential, difficult, and challenging job. It could be the best day of the year.