I’m 67 years old and I have done everything I could to avoid being a MOTHER.  It occurred to me, as I was searching for a Mother’s Day card for my mother, who is now 88 years old, how traumatic Mother’s Day has always been for me.

                Every year, I look through the various cards on display at the drug store.  Everyone is espousing great love for Mom, heralding Mom for always “being on my side” or giving “unconditional love.”  I choke. Too mushy.  My mother was more like a drill sergeant than a warm soft hand in a kitchen smelling like home-made bread.  Oh, she made bread, but then complained about the inconvenience of it, the extra work of it. After all, bread was readily available in grocery stores.  Back in the 1950s, it even came automatically pre-sliced.  But she was trying hard to prove that she was a good mom. You could tell she was struggling with it.  

                She could never see any point in doing all that cooking for Thanksgiving. She hated cooking.  Laundry was another issue. Why did she have to do such tedious work, week after week with no sense of accomplishment?  For all this work of mothering, she never got a paycheck or a vacation.  There was very little respect given to women back in the 1950s.  My dad tried to make her happy.  He bought her a dress for her birthday. She hated it. It was ugly, she said. Dad gave up on giving her gifts.  Since neither of them believed in divorce, having seen the trauma it can lead to, they stayed together.  They settled into a quiet life of paying the bills and watching television.  Mom preferred to hug her dog more than her children. After all, we created the dirty diapers, runny noses, pouting and crying that her dog never did.  Who could blame her?

                Back in the 1930s, when my mother was a child, she was a “latch-key” child.  She had to wear the house key around her neck and let herself into her home because her mother was always at work—never home to greet her children.  A divorcee with two kids during the Great Depression, my grand-mother struggled very hard to keep her two daughters alive.  To earn a living, she sewed buttons on donated shirts for the homeless in a DPW project.  Back in those “good old days” there were no SNAP programs, no welfare, no Social Security or Disability.  No health insurance.  The nearest medical center was sixty miles away.  So under these terrible conditions, where working men could find no jobs and working women got no support, my grandmother spent her time working and rarely saw her children. My mother raised herself, unaware of what mothering was supposed to be.

                There are people these days who want to do away with social service programs. They are jealous that the poor in this country are treated better than the middle-class.  So rather than ask that all people get social assistance when in need, they want to destroy any support that working women and men could get.  When hard times hit, they will get a society of broken families, latch-key children, and thousands of hungry and sick people roaming the streets.       

                Sadly, my own mother has been in support of destroying those social programs.  Like so many other ignorant people, she hopes that if she goes along with big business and its constant push for big profits, we will somehow create a better society.

                It's difficult to find a Mother's Day card when you face an irony like this.  But I realize I’m not the only one.  Finally, I find a card that works for me. One that’s not at all sentimental, just wishing you a happy Mother’s Day. I buy it and send it through the U.S. postal service—before it too is taken away.