mother's day

I am a sucker for mother's day.
By sucker I mean I loathe mother's day and the innate pressure I feel from it to live a traditional lifestyle.  I am far from traditional, far from "normal", far from the picturesque "mother" that I see around me.  I don't have a man that lives with me, and I am not the best at relationships ( although I am in a healthy, productive relationship with a great man currently).

That being said, seeing the mother's day commercials with the burly father and the kids in the garage playing music kind of makes me want to throw up.  Call me negative. Call me realistic.  How many women raise children on their own?  Plenty, yet the advertising world seems to sweep right over them and advertise to the husbands and not in a way that makes mothers like me feel very good about being a mother like me!

It is days like this where I turn to Ariel Gore's The Mother Trip and The Essential Hip Mama. Gore, a writer who is also "making it" as a single Mom, provides much needed sanity and clarity for any Mother.  Especially after a night where one is awoken at three am with macaroni and cheese projectiled across the room and onto the mural you have painstakingly created.  This mural, of course, not withstanding the upchuck of stomach acids mixed with the healthy kraft macaroni and cheese your child begged out of you, is ruined, and it is at this point you look to her work and say "well shit, I can do this". 

I know I am not the first woman who has considered heaving herself out of her second story window when her (then) three year  old ate a complete bottle of gummy vitamins ( which for the record are not as toxic as I thought), and then had to deal with the intestinal consequences.  But when you do feel like that, which is OK, remember to pick up the phone and call a friend/coworker/parent, or in my case, when none of these are available, pick up Ariel's work and take a namaste breath and just let it go.  I mean,  after thinking about it, the gummy vitamins are pretty good, and nothing bad did happen.  Feeling like you could win the "worst mother of the year award", however, is usually what brings the second story window into favor, but realizing that all of us, each and every one of us, mess up from time to time ( or in my case ALL the time), it helps make us better mothers, friends, workers, etc.

As much as I slammed mother's day earlier, especially for being a hetero-normative advertisers wet dream, I must admit this.  Without my mother I would be nothing. She is absolutely fantastic and I love to little smithereens.