Anne Lamott is one of my favorite writers of creative non-fiction. I love her writing – so raw and beautiful – because she meanders in an almost stream of consciousness fashion, then drops in a zinger so profound I have to put the book down just to let it sink in. She’s brilliant, irreverent, and unwilling to describe the world without utter honesty.
Lamott wrote an interesting article in Salon called “Why I Hate Mother’s Day,” in which she takes on the sentimentality of motherhood. What I took from this article was 1) Sentimentalizing mother’s day trivializes how incredibly difficult it is to be a mom. 2) Love is love, whether it is a mother’s for her child or otherwise – celebrate that and do it in genuine, not contrived, ways. 3) Mothers are all essentially connected to one another, and not all of them have children of their own.
I grew up with a killer mom who is exactly the type of woman described by Lamott. I married a woman, who became a mom, who is exactly the type of woman described by Lamott. Both of them are part of the “chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat.” To both of those incredible women I say that I honor you today as I do everyday, by trying to be the best son, the best husband I can be. You are the two strongest female voices in the back of my mind, and not a day goes by that I do not seek to honor you in the way I live my life. Forgive me when I fall short. Thank you for your unselfish life which makes my life possible.
Here are a few great quotes from Lamott’s article:
“The illusion is that mothers are automatically happier, more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be the mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants. These mothers do not want a box of chocolate. These mothers are on a diet.”
“But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.”
“No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children. But if you are going to include everyone, then make mine something like M&M;’s, and maybe flowers you picked yourself, even from my own garden, the cut stems wrapped in wet paper towels, then tin foil and a waxed-paper bag from my kitchen drawers. I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. Like everything else, it can fill me only if it is ordinary and available to all.”
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