Mothers Want Time, Not Pricey Gifts

Does a day honoring our mothers have to be so commercialized? There are entire Web sites devoted to selling stuff for Mother’s Day, which has become a billion-dollar industry cashing in on guilt and sentimentality. The mothers I know want time with their children, because time slips away and then our mother is a cranky old woman in a nursing home.

Am I being too harsh here? Maybe so, but let me continue.

In her younger years, my mother was too involved in life to care about Mother’s Day and in her latter years she was too involved in her misery. Even for those of us accustomed to putting others before ourselves, it seems artificial to set aside one day in our honor. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy going out to brunch and receiving cards, especially the funny ones. But we should honor our mothers with more than all the pink flowers and perfume money can buy.

As a daughter, Mother’s Day was hard on me. I would agonize over what card or gift to send my mother and never succeed in finding a card that hit just the right note. My mother was a complicated, unsentimental woman as well as a professional writer who idolized Virginia Woolf. She didn’t care for greeting-card schmaltz.

I’m sure I’m not the only daughter unable to find the right card for her mother, but like most women I always bought one anyway. Mother’s Day is the third biggest holiday for cards, according to the International Mass Retailers Association. The vast majority of the cards—eighty-three percent—are purchased buy women.

And Mother’s Day is second only to Christmas in gifts given.

Gifts. Finding the right gift for my mother wasn’t any easier than finding the right card. Any book I chose went unread. Any knickknack went unadmired. Sometimes she would regift it back to me or my children the very next holiday. And flowers? Mother told me that in her old age flowers reminded her of funerals. She feared her own was imminent.

In the latter years of my mother’s life, I would call up the local florist and ask them to send over either a fruit basket or a plant. And I would feel guilty that I hadn’t spent more time with her, a guilt that hangs over me still even though she died over a year ago at age ninety-seven. Never mind that she lived two states and an eight-hour drive away. Never mind that I begged her to live closer to me and she chose not to.

We’ll buy our mothers cards and gifts so we won’t feel guilty. But as women we must know that we will feel guilty about spending enough time with our children and then guilty about spending enough time with our mother. We console ourselves with a shopping trip when all they really want is our time. More frequent phone calls. More attention to what they have to say.

“Really? You don’t say? Then what happened? Of course I remember! No, I don’t think you told me that story before. If you did, I don’t mind hearing it again.”

In my experience, the most difficult time to deal with our mothers is when they reach old age and infirmity. Granted, there are the Kitty Carlisles of the world, and we all wish that our mothers would be independent and in good health forever. But when your mother gets old and needy and impossible to please like mine did … well, Mother’s Day is not the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards.

Our mother-daughter relationship got so tangled up I am still trying to sort it out all these months after her death. I’ll spend Mother’s Day like most days, hoping and praying I never get that way and become a source of my daughters’ guilt.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Mother’s Day. I really do. My two daughters who live locally will probably take me somewhere nice to eat, and maybe we’ll even see a movie. It’s the Mother’s Day marketing machine that gets me—sending the message that buying a trinket is the way to a mother’s heart. Not for any mother I know.