Do mothers deserve Mother's Day?
YES When I was but a pup, Mother's Day was one of the few opportunities I had to show the doting cow how much I really cared. In the days approaching that revered occasion, our teachers would ask us to make something 'special' for Mum. My classmates set out to sculpt yet another ceramic plant holder or something typically motherish. They used coloured crayons to scrawl lies on scraps of paper such as 'To the World's Greatest Mum'. Snivelling creeps.
While my peers saw no harm in such sycophantic behaviour, I refused to join them. The first time I got sucked into the conspiracy of filial piety, it was under threat of failing art class, which would have led to some kind of capital punishment at home. I knew something had to be done. So, with renewed vigour, a lump of clay and a jar of bile-coloured paint, I set out to create for Mother my own brand of gratitude. I made her an ashtray. An eye-catchingly ugly one. It was the perfect gift. She was a fervent non-smoker and self-prescribed doyenne of good taste.
She hated it. From the moment she eagerly ripped off the newsprint wrapping to the horrified gasp that followed, I can still taste the sweetness of that particular revenge.
Now, years later, I have less patience and less time. I also live on a different continent. Making mother's life miserable is no longer easy, but thanks to Mother's Day I can still take a stab at least once a year.
I know that weeks before that wonderful day, Mother will be bombarded by conventionally crass images of what she should expect: long-stemmed roses, candlelit dinners, Liberty scarves, chocolates, phone calls just to say, 'Thanks for being there, Mum.' All the hackneyed symbols of affection that we are manipulated into thinking express affection.
In anticipation, Mum would cross off the days on her calendar. She would not be able to concentrate on The Antiques Roadshow. She would sigh indulgently at the prospect of all the attention she was going to get. It was the perfect set-up for disappointment.
When the day finally arrives, she will rise from her bed and wait. Wait for the phone to ring, wait for the door to knock, wait for the sound of the postman's van, wait for any kind of sign that the being she sweated over during labour and disfigured her body for actually cares a jot. She will have a long wait. She'll hear nothing but silence.
Unfortunately, being thousands of kilometres away, I will not be able to participate in her suffering. But I can imagine it. And what a sublime imagining it is - all her effort, all her loving, all her care and attention for what? Nothing. Nada. Rien. Zilch.
So, should there be a Mother's Day? Absolutely. Face it, some Mother's deserve them.
NO No more than I deserve Journalist's Day, you deserve Reader's Day (thanks anyway) or last night's Tai Po lorry drivers deserve Newspaper Distributor's Day - although I'm sure that all three categories are honoured with due solemnity, expensive greeting cards and special restaurant menus in the United States, where they like to wallow in such things.
If you were in America last Monday, for instance, I hope you celebrated Jonas Salk Day, in honour of the man who discovered the polio vaccine. (One memorial sugar lump, or two?) And, depending on the date of your next visit, you can also observe Victims of Terrorism Day, Alopecia Awareness Week or National Hi-tech Month. It may be a good idea to try and coincide with Truck and Bus Safety Week in January. No National Fill-In-The-Blank Day as yet, but it's merely a matter of time.
The retrospection of adulthood leads me to assume that my mother can only have dreaded the arrival of what was supposed to be Her day - which, incidentally, usually fell in March, that being the time of year Europeans celebrate what is more formally called Mothering Sunday. (If it's such a big deal, why isn't Mother's Day universally standardised like Christmas or Lunar New Year?) She had to supply the money for us to buy chocolates - our favourites, naturally, not hers - and the wherewithal to create blobby greetings cards which trailed silver glitter all round the house until about September. We squabbled about who should make breakfast (burnt toast, tea made with hot water straight from the tap), which was then slopped over the reluctant parental bedclothes at some hour I can hardly bear to think of now.
Worst of all, an exhausted nobility set in for weeks afterwards. As we had paid proper homage to the day, nothing further needed to be done on the domestic front until, well, Father's Day, when the process repeated itself with minor variations (cars instead of cats on the blobby cards).
My mother could hardly complain but it seems probable that such occasions weren't the highlights of her maternal existence. We were the ones who were taken with the concept of squashing 365 days of gratitude into a single morning (the saintliness rarely made it into the afternoon). We'd seen the advertising and the shop displays, and we fell for the commercialism as only children can.
Now that I think about it, the breakfast idea came from a gruesome television ad for cornflakes or washing-up liquid, starring two little blonde blisters with twee lisps. Why we wished to emulate them I can't imagine, it only goes to show the horribly insidious power of television.
It's funny, my mother didn't think of reciprocating this deal on Children's Day, a date which really exists, and she was right. What could she have done that she didn't do already? Mothers deserve much, much more than just Mother's Day.
