How to Survive Mother's Day

A)  Having a mother

1.    Be grateful you were born. No matter how much she angered, angers, or will anger you, find a granule of gratitude under there. Maybe it’s buried, under rage, or worry, or loss. But some part of your brilliant being knows you came out of someone’s womb. For now, there’s no other way to be born.  The transmen who have given birth are important but rare exceptions: fathers with wombs. In any case you were born from a body, not a test tube. Thank that body in some way, even if only in your heart, and not to the person who occupied/occupies the body from which you were born.

2.    If your mother is absent – mentally/emotionally/physically, or dead – mark that. If you never met your birth mother – you were adopted, or fostered, or she died in childbirth, even if you love your adopted mother, there still can be a lot of loss on this day. Acknowledge its effect on you. Maybe recognizing Mother’s Day often feels more like jealousy of other people’s seemingly normal or even healthy relationships with their moms. Share with someone, or ones, you trust, how hard it is for you. Make a new normal: if you share your struggles, others will, too, and we can break to delusion that mothering is somehow easy, and being mothered is somehow simple.

3.    Maybe you have two or more mothers – raised by a cackle of witches, or lesbian couple. Or an aunt, or stepmother, or godmother, or family friend feels more like a mother to you. Try to thank as many mothers as you have had, at least in your heart.

4.    Gratitude can contain multitudes. Gratitude doesn’t mean forgiveness, or ignoring all prior harm. It just means in this moment, you recognize the value of others giving and sustaining your life. That simple. That hard.

B)  Being a mother

5.     Being a mother is the entirely most under-appreciated job/role in this world, to this day and beyond. Thank yourself for taking on. Don’t expect anyone else to pamper you, or thank you. Nurture yourself best you can today.

6.     If you were a mother but… you lost a child, or they are grown up and a longer around, or they are teenagers and seem to hate you - know you still have mother in you. You have mothered, even if only in your womb. So feel these mother part or parts, and respect and appreciate her/them, even if only by you, even if only for moment.

7.    If you were not recognized as a mother, but you’re still mother see number six.

8.    If you are mother with a living mother, you’re in a very peculiar and precious position. You see all the ends of motherhood intertwined, an ouroboros of birth and death, of offering, honoring, and rejecting. Trying to get bigger than the whole, to hold it for yourself, for your mother, for your child/children. If you can’t, don’t judge yourself; hold the knot of where you are like a paradox or puzzle.

9.     If you are a grandmother, thank yourself at least twice, sincerely. Really. You’re in the bonus round, but that doesn’t make things easier. You’re still mother, only now a mother of a mother. Mothering a mother is a hell of a job.

 

C)  Not Being a Mother

 10. You don’t have children, you didn’t have children. You don’t identify with motherhood.

        Celebrate the women who do identify with motherhood and you are doing it. Especially the

        women you see doing it well – friends, coworkers, cousins, celebrities, even. If only in your  

        heart, let the extra space of non-mothering you can offer hold the impossible whole of  

       motherhood for others.

11. If you are a man, a father or not, give the mothers you know lots of leeway today. As much as you can. Recognize your mother. Mourn that you will never mother, if you feel that grief, if you plan to stay man.

 

D)  All the Rest

If you’ve read this far in the piece and are thinking: How dare she tell me what to do!, or you don’t see yourself reflected in it – please, I beg of you, make your own instructions. There are as many ways to survive mothering, mothers, and Mother’s Day, as there are children. And we were all children, once. We were all born from someone, directly from the womb: by C-section or live birth; breech, or head first; just-in-time, too early, too late. Someone held us in a womb for a long time, even if they didn’t know how to mother us after we were born, or seemed not to care, or fucked up. So make up your own playbook. If you do, share it and encourage others to do the same, too. Because no matter what the patriarchy says, we don’t see or hear from mothers or about mothers enough. And this is the day for that.