The holiday can feel coercive, as though it tells us what to feel and leaves out the experiences of those who don’t fit its template
Half our holidays are punitive, at least for those left out of what the the holiday is supposed to celebrate. If you don’t have money for gifts and a thriving family life or just avoid events at the intersection of Jesus and shopping, Christmas can be unpleasant; Valentine’s Day sprinkles a little salt in the wounds of the unattached; and Thanksgiving thumbs its nose at Native America. Then there’s Mother’s Day.
Mother, like police, judge and father, is both a noun and a verb. Those are things that some of us are and some of us do. It’s noteworthy that the verb father means little more than begetting, while mother as both noun and verb stirs up a whole ocean of ideas about ceaseless love and nurture and caregiving. The ideal seems so lofty no mortal can live up to it, and while fathers are often praised for doing more than nothing, mothers are often castigated for doing less than everything and for not doing it perfectly. And perfectly, for mothers, tends to mean selflessly, superhumanly, relentlessly. Giving birth is as biological as it gets, but the job assignment from there on out seems to be for a deity or the Virgin Mary.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence
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