Free All Wound Up by Stephanie Pearl–McPhee Page B

talking to them through the door.
    When the girls were really tiny, Mother’s Day didn’t go well because they were babies, and babies don’t care about Mother’s Day (or any other day, for the record). They still puke on that day, and they still want only you on that day and you still can’t stop them from peeing down your skirt in a restaurant on that day, even though it’s been clearly marked to be your day. The most loving spouse can’t make a baby not wake you up seventeen times to be nursed on Mother’s Day. Intelligent women, myself included, should give up entirely on any Mother’s Day involving a human young enough to have no control over their bodily fluids, and lower their standards accordingly.
    When the girls were a little bigger, they couldn’t focus on it, and if you can’t spell “Mother’s Day” you probably won’t be able to pull if off. Mother’s Day is about putting someone else ahead of yourself, and little ones can’t do that—and even if they do try, just understanding that it’s Mother’s Day really isn’t enough to stave off the temper tantrum that’s inevitable if you are six years old and the card you tried to make is stuck to the table with glue. I let go of those days too, even as I soaked the glue and sparkles off of the table and soothed my child’s disappointment by assuring them that I’d never wanted anything more for Mother’s Day than sparkles embedded in the carpet and a three-hour cleaning job, and that it was better that the card was stuck on the table. Now I could see it all day long.
    When they were teenagers, I’m pretty sure that what went wrong was that simply by their nature, being people who are busy becoming people and therefore not able to pull their heads out of their arses for fifteen seconds, they had some selfish behavior. On one classic Mother’s Day, I remember letting go entirely when I told a teenager I’d rather they stayed home and spent time with me that evening, and they turned to me point blank and said that since I was always in charge “every day was Mother’s Day” and that they didn’t see why they shouldn’t even up the injustice by going to the movies with their friends.
    It was always a disaster—a terrible disaster—and it took me years to work out that it was a disaster not because they didn’t love me, but because I was actually buying into the idea that this was some sort of report card. That if they really cared, this was my children’s chance to show me, and that if they really loved me they would do well, or at least be nice to me, or at least not choose today to flush something of mine down the toilet or try to hustle me for twenty bucks so they could go out with their real friends who really cared about them and have some real fun.
    I would stand there and think, “How can you treat me this way? It’s Mother’s Day. It’s supposed to be the day that you show me how much you love me, and this is it? This is the best you can do? This is all that you can find in your heart for me? The stupid fight about belly-button piercing? This is what you’re giving me?” Then I would dissolve into tears, not understanding the irony in the fact that if there weren’t children, and they didn’t act like children, I wouldn’t need to be a mother, and, then, feelings injured to the point of breaking… I’d haul off and cancel the whole thing. (That’s right. I’m that woman. The woman who cancels Mother’s Day. It’s supposed to be about me. I can do that if I want to.) Some years I even preemptively cancelled it, taking my stand in late April.
    It wasn’t until lately, when my children are big enough to play the game, that it finally occurred to me that the reason Mother’s Day didn’t sit right with me was because it wasn’t about me. It was about the myth of happy mothers, and selling lots of cards and flowers, and it turns out that pinning all your hopes on one day like it was an award with a title called