• We don't want gifts, cards or spa treatments scheduled for busy days
Image: PIXABAY
Last Sunday was the second Sunday of May, also known globally as Mother’s Day.
This is a day to celebrate all mothers. It is a day to appreciate the women in our lives and all they do without any compensation and sometimes little gratitude.
But it is also the day to leave mothers the hell alone!
We love our children with every fibre of our beings. In fact, the more science advances, the more they find out about our mother-infant bond. Traces of a child’s DNA can still be found in the mother’s brain many years after birth.
A more recent study of the mother-daughter paradigm showed that a woman is born with every ovary that will produce. Which means my egg was inside my mother when my mother was still an egg inside her mother, and so on and so on, the cycle spun since Mitochondrial Eve!
Being a mother is a true phenomenon, an excerpt of nature’s wonder at work. However, we get one day, just one day to be free from the ‘job’ that comes with the title mother. And that is Mother's Day. You see, Mother's Day is not just an appreciation day, it’s a day to allow mothers the freedom of what they choose to do for 24 hours.
This might seem like a small feat to some, but I believe those people have no inkling of what it means to be a mother. A mother wears many hats and does everything for everyone. To achieve maximum effect in our care for others, something has to suffer. More often than not, that something is us.
We drink cold coffees, serve ourselves last, take care of every person in the household, maintain every nook and cranny of the house, before we wake up the next day and do it all over again. So we have collectively agreed (without ever holding a meeting) that every second Sunday of May, we want to be left completely alone and do absolutely nothing.
We don't want gifts, cards, spa treatments scheduled for busy days. No, we want a Sunday where we don't watch the kids, we don't cook, do laundry, iron, wash dishes, clean the house, make the beds, wipe snots... We want none of it.
While the weight of the world often rests on a mother’s shoulder, and it is true that society would not function without women, it is also true that the sky will not collapse if we took a day off. It is true that fathers are more capable than they believe. It is very possible for our families to survive 24 hours without us.
You know how Mariah Carey sang All I want for Christmas is you? Well, we mothers say, All I want for Mother’s Day is more me and less you!