Mother's Day- Killing Me Softly

10 years ago I sent my mother sunflowers for Mother's Day. Living in NYC at the time, I remember very strongly wanting to go home to see her. But I was going home for a wedding Memorial Day weekend and it seemed silly (and expensive for my broke self) to make 2 trips so close together. I was so irrationally (or so I believed) panicked about not going home, that I decided to get out of town camping that weekend instead. Just to feel like I was DOING something. There was no cell service and I remember driving into a tiny town in the Catskills and calling her from a pay phone. She said she got the flowers and they were beautiful. Less than a month later she was dead. Cancer. Cancer we had thought she had beat. And I learned the flowers were NOT beautiful. They had arrived and they were wilted and horrible. She called the company I had used to send them and they had resent equally horrible flowers. So, in my mind, I kind of failed my mother's last Mother's Day.

Ever since then, Mother's Day has been pretty awful. As the Mother's Day ad blitz begins, the voice softly repeating over and over again "your mother is dead. your mother is dead. your mother is dead" begins its beating in my head in response to every ad I hear. It's as morbid as it sounds. Not fun. Potentially crazy making. Awfulness/insanity peaked from 2008-2010 when I was trying and failing to become a mother myself.

Everyone told me it would get easier once I became a mom, but you know what? Not so much. I gotta be honest and say that just hasn't happened yet. And I fear it never will.  Because as much as I love my kids, as much as I dreamed of celebrating Mother's Day as a Mom, as grateful as I am that I can do that very thing, my mother is still dead. And on Mother's Day, more than any day of the year, I am reminded that there is no one who can and will ever love me in that same way again. That's the hard truth. Every year, no matter how hard I try to prep myself, it breaks my heart.

And all that being said, I don't hate Mother's Day. I don't have any social or political ill will against it. I don't think it's an affront to women or setting us back 50 years glorifying traditional gender roles. I don't think it's another example of consumerism destroying the very fabric of family life. I think its theoretically pretty great. I remember really loving the holiday back when I was a kid. I loved plotting and planning with my sister what to do for her. I loved going card shopping with my dad to find the perfect card to make her laugh or make her cry. Heck I even remember loving it 10 years ago. I loved the idea of being reminded to take time to appreciate my mother, who I didn't always appreciate in the way a small voice in the back of my head knew she deserved to be appreciated. The same small voice that taunts me today.

So we celebrate. And I smile and take pictures for the scrapbook and I suck it up. Because I want to give my kids Mothers Day. Untainted. I want to give them years of  plotting and planning and making me laugh. I want them to celebrate that no one will ever love them in the same way that I do.