When In Doubt, Deliver It
Mother’s Day. In the best of situations, it’s a day pre-positioned for stress, where members of happy, well-adjusted families have to figure out how to honor Mom with whatever she likes (which, please God, isn’t restaurant brunch: the lines, the price gouging, the families competing for best dressed and smiley-est and Called Ahead For a Booth) while still managing to see both grandmothers and swing by the adult care home (known in the slang of my professional life as ACH, not to be confused with Automatic Clearing House, which is the sweepstakes-y sounding way your auto pays occur) to bring great-grandma a plant she won’t personally care for, or a book she may no longer have the attention span to read. In this scenario, after all, she’s the linchpin, the pregnant-at-18 homesteader or inner city matriarch from whom all these people have sprung.
In other cases, Mother’s Day is a shitshow of recrimination, broken hearts, dashed expectations, or worse. These days, even retailers acknowledge Mother’s Day can open wounds or aggravate those that may never have healed. Both my local day spa and the online florist I use sent me emails well in advance, advising me to respond to a survey if I did not want to receive Mother’s Day emails from them, out of respect for what one site called “the complicated feelings Mother’s Day can bring.” So that’s good at least.
