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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.
Maybe you have a stellar relationship with your very loving mother, who has always made room for you in her life, accepted you for who you are, gone out of her way to support you as you pursue what matters, and always kept her expectations clear and reasonable. Maybe you have a laundry list of ways in which your mom didn’t measure up over the years, which is fine, as long as you’re willing to accept she might have that same list about you. As is her perfect right. I cut my little sister’s bangs (like, frighteningly short) when she was about 4. I once broke a pot on our front porch that contained a plant my mother loved, and propped the pieces back up in hopes she wouldn’t notice. When she later watered it, it all slid apart, wet soil sluicing down the front steps, and the innocence on my face, the sheer, “what the heck!” astonishment I projected, would have convinced the pope himself. Another time I, along with two neighborhood accomplices, carried the family TV, a heavy tube model from the late 70s, from its perch in the…
