Every year on Mother’s Day I find myself feeling for all those whom the good Lord saw fit to birth unto a woman no more suited for motherhood than June Cleaver was suited for professional mud wrestling. All around them others are waxing rhapsodic about their loving, tender, wise, resourceful, self-sacrificing Exemplary Mother, while they’re stuck remembering how their loser witch of a mom used to feed them cat food, or lock them naked outside in the rain, or in some other way make clear they were basically crazy.
To we who belong in the Crappy Mother’s Day Club, I say this: besides selling mountains of over-priced, landfill-filling sentimentalized detritus, the reason d’etre for Mother’s Day is to fortify people’s desperate need to forever tell themselves that they had mothers who weren’t self-centered cretins who had no more business raising children than a fish has raising gerbils. They must tell themselves that they had a good mommy, and a happy childhood, and a wonderful family life, and that growing up everything for them was fabulous and sunny and happy and healthy. Because if they don’t tell themselves that — if for a moment they allow themselves to feel what an unhappy, crappy mother they had — then very quickly things start getting very bad for them indeed.
They know if they so much as go near that thread, the whole sweater will fall apart.
Hah! Losers.
Better to look in your wallet and know that you’re broke, than to never look in it and insist that you’re rich.
Happy Crappy Mother’s Day, you brave and unswerving adherents to the truth!
And to those of you lucky enough to have been blessed with a sane, good mother? We charter members of the HCMD club embrace you, sincerely wish you a wonderful Mother’s Day, and trust you’ll forgive us if we step out of your Mother’s Day celebration just the slightest bit early.
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