Apparently this year companies are sending out marketing emails allowing you to opt out of Mother’s Day messaging (this is according to my crone friends) so please feel free to opt out of this RBCA if Mother’s Day is difficult for you. This has been a grim year for women and mothers in America. I get it.
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Yesterday I found out two things. One, Heather Armstrong died. I never read her blog — not my cup of tea — but she was a significant force in peeling back the curtain on the messy, fraught, frankly not-radiant realities of motherhood for many women, including the ways motherhood and depression can entangle themselves into a rat king of psychological hell, which it sounds like consumed her in the end.
Two, my parents’ neighbor killed his wife. When my mom came outside and asked about the crime scene tape, the first responders told her it was “a family matter.” The social media posts and news stories about the incident were full of the same comments: tragic, heartbreaking, so sad for her kids. Which, of course. But can we please stop acting like these are isolated, private tragedies instead of a massive, pervasive problem that needs solving. This is not a family matter, this is a civilized society matter, and yes, it is heartbreaking, but it is also enraging. If we want to honor mothers let’s stop letting them die and/or actively killing them. Mothers are people. Women are people.
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Anyway, I post some version of this Mother’s Day Invocation on Facebook every year, so here is my 2023 edition:
Happy Mother’s Day to the 20% of US mothers who suffer from perinatal depression, especially if you’re still in it
Happy Mother’s Day to all the women who’ve been treated like inexhaustible caring machines
Happy Mother’s Day to all the women adjusting to an empty nest
Happy Mother’s Day to the women I don’t like or agree with
Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers who didn’t want kids
Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who has experienced pregnancy loss, which affects 25% of all pregnancies, and to those who have lost a child later in life
Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who’s had a traumatic childbirth and birth injuries that never healed
Happy Mother’s Day if you’re flat broke
Happy Mother’s Day if you’re doing this on your own, don’t have a supportive partner, are scared, exhausted, just trying to make it through the day so your kids can have a better life
Happy Mother’s Day to all the women who gave up something when they had children that they never got back
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In the interest of making myself useful, here are some links:
Working Daughter is a good read for those women in middle age who are balancing work, kids, and eldercare. (Here are her tips for a WD Mother’s Day.)
No One Is Coming To Save Us started out as a podcast about the broken childcare system in the US, but has morphed into a general discussion of how inhospitable a place America can be to raise a child [I was recommending this one to anyone who would listen last year so sorry-not-sorry if you’ve heard this before]
In contrast, Germany has clinics for burned out parents [maybe proof that the Aldi brand version of everything is better]
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I will leave you this week with a song that was previously unknown to me until I picked up Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, which follows two teenage girls during their last summer together in 1972:
Joni Mitchell was keening “Little Green” on Sils’s record player. Sils listened to that song all the time now, like some woeful soundtrack. The soprano slides and oos of the song always made us both sing along, when I was there. “Little Green, be a gypsy dancer.” Twenty years later at a cocktail party, I would watch an entire roomful of women, one by one and in bunches, begin to sing this song when it came on over the sound system. They quit conversations, touched people’s arms, turned toward the corner stereo speakers and sang in a show of memory and surprise. All the women knew the words, every last one of them, and it shocked the men.
If you don’t know what it’s about, please Google it.
—CB