today make me have ALL THE FEELS
May. 10th, 2015 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancing_crowhappy mother's day that I do not believe in. My mother's birthday is May 12. When I was growing up it was unclear if we were supposed to make a fuss over her actual personal day, or over the generic mother's day. Since she is an individual, it seemed like a better idea to pay attention to what she wanted and celebrate her birthday, with a nod to that weird flower day none of us believe in.
When I was a teenager with horses, the second Sunday in May was the more or less permanent date of the Essex County 4H horse show. This meant that Friday and Saturday were lost to a whirlwind of show preparation. Friday was dedicated to making sure the show would go well, including setting up rings of snow-fencing, dragging jump standards and rails in from three different families who were loaning them and setting up jump courses, western trail riding obstacle courses... you get the drift. It was a long afternoon and evening, with charming people doing hard work. Saturday was dedicated to readying the horse; think spa day for equines and you get the idea. Bathing, trimming, shining hooves, and then shutting them up so they wouldn't roll. Generally there was also a frantic visit to the tack store in Rowley, because new pieces were needed. This visit was regular enough that even now when I walk into a tack shop and the lovely smell of leather washes over me I think of Mother's Day and my mother's birthday. Sunday was the day of the show itself. My mother would disappear to help, with a coteries of other people's mothers, I would proceed with my show, and find her to share the joys and griefs of each class. Nothing could have been less celebratory of mothers than this process, and yet this is my most enduring memory of Mother's Days for years.
Once my daughter was born, my mother and I between us redefined Mother's Day as the day your first child is born. This made more sense to both of us - it let my mother keep her own birthday in the face of something she saw as a made up holiday, and it allowed me to think about mothering and how it might be better celebrated. So I'm not doing much about today, and I'll attempt to do something nice for my mother when her birthday comes early next week. I have ducked celebrating Mother's Day as a mom pretty much forever. I do have a weird little private celebration on Aerin's birthday, my own personal Mother's Day, but that is private.
so Happy Mother's Day to those who celebrate it. Moms are important - they make you and support you, they can really mess you up, we all have at least one mother figure we rely on, and we should absolutely pay attention. For people with more strained relations with their mothers, you have all my sympathy. It must be hard having something like mothering idealized in ways you never got a chance to experience. It is less that people want you to submit to the cult of mom, and more that, in their own ways, they are grappling with what they might owe their own mothers, and their own children if they are mothers. Mothers are such a large group of people, there are no generalizations that work well across them. Everyone has a mother. Everyone. We know them or we don't. They drive us crazy or support us or we support them or it was once one way and now it is another or we don't talk because they choose to be gone or we choose to be gone or they died, too soon, pretty much always too soon...
Mother's day makes me crazy, for so many reasons.
When I was a teenager with horses, the second Sunday in May was the more or less permanent date of the Essex County 4H horse show. This meant that Friday and Saturday were lost to a whirlwind of show preparation. Friday was dedicated to making sure the show would go well, including setting up rings of snow-fencing, dragging jump standards and rails in from three different families who were loaning them and setting up jump courses, western trail riding obstacle courses... you get the drift. It was a long afternoon and evening, with charming people doing hard work. Saturday was dedicated to readying the horse; think spa day for equines and you get the idea. Bathing, trimming, shining hooves, and then shutting them up so they wouldn't roll. Generally there was also a frantic visit to the tack store in Rowley, because new pieces were needed. This visit was regular enough that even now when I walk into a tack shop and the lovely smell of leather washes over me I think of Mother's Day and my mother's birthday. Sunday was the day of the show itself. My mother would disappear to help, with a coteries of other people's mothers, I would proceed with my show, and find her to share the joys and griefs of each class. Nothing could have been less celebratory of mothers than this process, and yet this is my most enduring memory of Mother's Days for years.
Once my daughter was born, my mother and I between us redefined Mother's Day as the day your first child is born. This made more sense to both of us - it let my mother keep her own birthday in the face of something she saw as a made up holiday, and it allowed me to think about mothering and how it might be better celebrated. So I'm not doing much about today, and I'll attempt to do something nice for my mother when her birthday comes early next week. I have ducked celebrating Mother's Day as a mom pretty much forever. I do have a weird little private celebration on Aerin's birthday, my own personal Mother's Day, but that is private.
so Happy Mother's Day to those who celebrate it. Moms are important - they make you and support you, they can really mess you up, we all have at least one mother figure we rely on, and we should absolutely pay attention. For people with more strained relations with their mothers, you have all my sympathy. It must be hard having something like mothering idealized in ways you never got a chance to experience. It is less that people want you to submit to the cult of mom, and more that, in their own ways, they are grappling with what they might owe their own mothers, and their own children if they are mothers. Mothers are such a large group of people, there are no generalizations that work well across them. Everyone has a mother. Everyone. We know them or we don't. They drive us crazy or support us or we support them or it was once one way and now it is another or we don't talk because they choose to be gone or we choose to be gone or they died, too soon, pretty much always too soon...
Mother's day makes me crazy, for so many reasons.