I wasn’t looking forward to Mother’s Day since no children were going to honor me and my own mother is long gone. My plan was to just suck it up and go out for an omelette. I forgot to factor in my newsletters.

I get so many newsletters even though I’m always cancelling them. The one’s I really should cancel are the suicide alliance newsletter and the one for parents of adult children who hate them. They mean well and at times they have been mildly comforting. They aren’t as bad as the one from Compassionate Friends, which has a lot of butterflies.

So they each sent out a special thing about mother’s day, offering platitudes that make everything so much worse.

The suicide one offered poems from mothers, sharing their Journeys, along the lines of

I remember my shock and how numb I felt

and how I cried

and sobbed

and how I couldn’t get out of bed and

wanted to die

and how I sat in his room

and sobbed some more….

This isn’t verbatim, the poems were actually more upsetting and alarming. Not a Journey I wish to take since my own Journey is quite enough even though I’m not on one.

The Adult Kids Who Hate You newsletter had some advice on how to answer questions from nosy friends about what you’re doing on Mother’s Day. Stuff like, “My daughter is very independent so she’s off doing her thing.”

Haha, jesus christ, how about a nice “Fuck you, mind your own business”?

Tips on how to handle shame and guilt must be good for somebody and there must be market for them. Me, I’m not ashamed or guilty. My kids can go read about shame and guilt since they’re the ones who left the world or Can’t Stand Mommy.

Instead of the omelette, I cooked a chicken for my mother-in-law and brought it over to her. I make a damn good chicken, as many people already know, and she cleaned her plate. Her own daughter had elected to celebrate mothers day by going to Las Vegas and not even calling.

Mothers and children of mothers, it’s a hard road being a human being even if you aren’t in Yemen eating dirt. The only thing to do is cancel your newsletters and carry on.



photo – Denis Dailleux, Mother and Son 2009