When mother’s day is hard, because you’ve lost your mother in some way (not death)

So, I don’t talk about my mother a lot. Mostly because it’s painful, hard to deal with and emotionally draining to …give her any time in print, on the phone, in any way for me honestly.

It’s one of the reasons I think I’ve been so irritable the last few weeks. It doesn’t help that the moment Easter is over, we’re bombarded with adverts for mother’s day gifts. They exhort us to REMEMBER MOM! She’ll love {FILL IN WHAT THE ADVERT IS FOR}, etc, etc. These ads also do their best to shame you if you don’t buy the best for mom!

Well that’s all well and good but what if you have no relationship with your mother? Or a very dysfunctional, broken, for all intents and purposes failure of a mother-daughter existence? What then? What do you do with the endless barrage of commercial guilt you are pelted with until the end of mother’s day, scolding you for not getting anything with mere hours left to show mom you care!

I thought I’d done my best to trash adverts like that with Gmail rules, unsubscribing from some retailers, etc when I couldn’t escape the consumer-centric, show you care by spending loads of money campaigns. Every year though, it’s the same and it starts earlier and earlier. The moment mother’s day stuff is done, we’ll resume the cycle with father’s day adverts… to a degree. That’s a whole other issue for me that’s staying right here for now.

It’s difficult for me, and by difficult I usually try to avoid social media, anything that involves interacting with people in some way. Without fail, someone will wish me a happy mother’s day. I know, well I hope it’s coming from a good place but when you are really, really in a dark place about that day; it’s hard to not bare fangs and let the claws come out.

I could have been a mother, I chose not to for a lot of reasons I’ve covered in previous posts on here & elsewhere. Some days I wish my mother had made the same choice but Roe V Wade was passed too late for that to be an option. It’s difficult when the person who is suppose to nurture, care for you and be that guide is the exact opposite of that when you need it.

That’s what makes mother’s day hard for me, that disconnect between what is supposed to be based on societal convention versus what I got. Which is a mother than didn’t want me, who didn’t understand that my decisions were made for me, and not for her to make up for lost experiences and dreams. It’s knowing that she sees not a daughter but a failed sisterhood I never needed, wanted or asked for.

I can’t be her friend, not when she doesn’t see me as much besides a walking atm, or handy drop off point for blame, or what she’s lacking in her life. That got worse when my grandmother passed, 10…no 11 years ago this September. The co-dependence really took hold, including but not limited to even greater emotional manipulation, tears and the infamous ‘you’re all I have!’ bullshit that was used to sucker me into dropping everything for her comfort, her needs, her emergencies that she could have avoided if for a few choices made of necessity rather than simplistic wants.

It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a day celebrating motherhood when you don’t know what it’s like to have a good mother in your life. It’s hard not to seethe with envy and bitterness at the happiness on your social media feeds of others with happy, shiny relationships with their mother. It’s hard not to run screaming from the laptop or toss your phone at the overarching message of you’re wrong, you’re broken if you aren’t happy for today if you’re a daughter or son; or if you are a mother in a child/parent relationship that falls short of the social mark we’re supposed to strive for.

It’s just…mother’s day fucks me up in a bad way. It’s a lot of things rolled into one but what it comes down to is I don’t have the ideal, I never will and having the ideal thrown at me forever is harder and harder each year. I think it might be easier if it were a matter of grieving a deceased mother, but even death doesn’t erase the lack when someone is alive, but so emotionally distant they may as well be in another galaxy.