The Really Snarky Post
I’ve been putting off writing this post about Mother’s Day because I truly believe that mothers should be honored. And I hope to find myself in their ranks someday.
That being said, it’s been many, many years since I’ve been comfortable with the holiday. My own mother died when I was 13 and that pretty much killed any relationship I had to the holiday right there. Most years I’ve been able to hold my breath and force myself into the card shop to buy a card for my grandmother but that’s about it.
This year I’ve been ignoring it all together. It helps that my mother-in-law lives in the UK, which celebrates Mothering Sunday on a different day. We order flowers for her online and that’s fine. Aside from the constant barrage of commercials here, I’m usually able to look away. This was pretty much my method of coping with Valentine’s Day in years when I was single – rent a movie, drink some wine, wake up the next morning and it will be over.
I did used to stop and wonder though, whether advertisers ever thought about those who, for one reason or another, had no living mother. Perhaps they’d just lost theirs, how would those mothers day ads make them feel? My day job is in marketing, I get that it’s all about making a buck and that holidays like this one that pulls on our emotions are huge cash cows for the card and floral industries, but still.
This year, for the first time, I’m feeling the double-whammy of the day. We were never given an official due-date when I was pregnant but it would have been sometime in July. I suspect that we’d be having a bit of an alcohol-free celebration this Sunday had I not miscarried.
Due to not really want to face the feelings of that the realization and my recent whirlwind of travel and trying to make major life decisions (or in waiting for those in whose hands part of those decisions to call me – STILL waiting for a call from Mr. Company Owner who has been good about sending me e-mails of apology for not yet getting back to me but that’s not really the same as giving me SOME idea of what’s going on), I pretty much managed to blissfully put the day out of my mind, marketing e-mails and commercials included.
I know that I’ll have to call my 95-year-old grandmother to apologize for not sending her a card (her birthday is in 2 weeks and I swear I’ll make it up to her!). But now I have my dad leaving me messages reminding me to send his wife a card. Granted, this is nothing new. He does it every year regardless of the fact that she and I are not close in any way and have never lived in the same state much less had any sort of maternal/child relationship. He does it because she’d give him grief otherwise, even though a card from me is not going to make her day any better. But the lack of a card would just be one more thing to complain about.
I know my dad. He wants to keep the peace and usually I don’t blame him. And for his sake, I’ll send a gratuitous card that says nothing because really I have nothing to say other than that I want to scream at everyone who doesn’t understand what infertility and loss does to you and to your self esteem and how it shakes your whole belief system down to the core. But that’s not much of a sentiment for a mother’s day card, now is it?
