It's Other's Day (Again).
Beyond gender tropes, commercialism and one-size-fits all motherhood
I’m ready friends. I’ve reflected. I’ve strategized. I’ve hydrated and carb-loaded and trained and tapered. I feel thoroughly prepared for Mother’s Day this year1. Bring it on! Bring on the annual crapload of cloying messages and messianic motherhood myths that come at us like pollen particles scattered on the May breeze! You know the ones I’m talking about (and if you don’t, take a stroll down the Mother’s Day section of the greeting cards aisle or tune into the Hallmark Channel for 60 seconds or less this weekend). They’re the ones suffused with toxic femininity, maternal martyrdom and motherhood as a fast track to sainthood.
Yep, I’m ready. If all goes according to plan, I’ll nimbly intercept each and every slippery Mother’s Day maneuver like a nunchuck-wielding, gender-bending ninja. Then, I’ll do what I must to keep it from penetrating and permeating my psyche. I’ve solemnly sworn to self that I shan’t allow this phantasm of a “holiday” to wring me out a single time more like some soft cloth used to wipe clean the apple cheeks of mother’s little cherubs.
I’ve learned my lesson about this the hard way, of course. For years on end, I watched myself slide helplessly into the bog of guilt, compare-and-despair, and over-compensation. These are the raw materials that fuel the commercial engine, not to mention the widespread (albeit largely invisible) angst of that dreaded 24-hour descent into the umbilical underworld commonly known as Mother’s Day.
For me — I’m guessing for many of us — this day has hit like a one-two punch. First, I never felt quite like I was paying adequate homage to my own long-suffering mother. Then, I never felt anywhere near worthy of the mother title, much less the celebration of myself as “queen for a day.”
When it came to honoring my own mother, I struggled to find the right Mother’s Day greeting, because card shops were peddling only the most pedestalizing praise. The syrupy sweetness of the available options left me feeling covered with the sticky residue of fakery.
While I loved my mom, I felt a great deal of ambivalence about our relationship. I deeply appreciated some of the ways she showed up for me in her maternal role and deeply resented others. And the truth is that there were many ways in which I really had to mother myself. I wasn’t looking for a card that would indict her, but I also wasn’t looking to deify her.
And as to my identity after having birthed my own kid? Well, that was bound tight by the same vine choking off my suppressed trans identity. It was also the same vine locking me into the facade of a cis-hetero-normative life I had styled after my mother’s, which she had styled after her own mother’s and on and on back through the matrilineage.
I came out as queer a little over two years into my motherhood tenure. And although it was years after that before I legally transitioned, my gender dysphoria was — had always been — there. And so had the need to figure out how to reconcile it with my role as my child’s birth mother. What should my child call me? How should I refer to myself? What should I do about Mother’s Day?
Over the years, there’s also been the complication of holding space for others’ confusion when they’ve confronted the conundrum of me vis a vis the mother/father “holidays.” Some who knew pre-transition me continued to wish me a happy Mother’s Day. Others, perhaps trying to show allyship, said nothing on Mother’s Day but wished me a happy Father’s Day. Some just ignored the whole thing. Rarely did anyone ask what might feel best for me…and none of it felt like a fit. *I* felt like I wasn’t a fit. The cognitive dissonance was profoundly painful.
Whew. Let’s set my story to the side for now and bottom line the Mother’s Day conundrum more broadly:
Neither gender nor motherhood are a natural or biological inevitability. They are social constructs. Yet our culture continues to imply that motherhood is a milestone that bodies assigned female at birth inevitably reach along their life’s journey. IF they do things “right.”
If we pause to really think about this, there are quite a load of reasons that the one-size-fits all celebration of Mother’s Day sets so many of us up for exclusion, feelings of inadequacy and, more often than we acknowledge, heart-ache. Here’s a short list, straight from my own think tank:
Not all who birth babies are female;
Not everyone who has a body that’s capable of birthing chooses to, and some who would choose to have bodies that can’t;
Some who have birthed children have lost those children for reasons beyond their control;
Some who have birthed children have not done so out of choice, and some have suffered great trauma in doing so;
Not all who birth children are nurturing to those children — some may be indifferent, abusive, neglectful, or all of these;
Many have nurtured and supported children in a way that culture considers “maternal,” yet have not birthed children of their own; and
We’re not all in agreement that birthing children is “the highest calling.”
What’s that you say? What about the fact that Mother’s Day, which in modern times began as a feminist anti-war effort, has been co-opted by consumer capitalism? Yeah, I know friends. There *is* that, too. The more I examine this for myself, the more I see how powerful the manipulation of the marketplace truly is. Its success rate in getting us to abandon our values is nothing if not stunning.
In fact, Mother’s Day really strikes me as a commercial dream come true. It sticks a red-hot poker right into the tender heart of all of our earliest attachment wounds, then promises a variety of performative antidotes we need only apply for a single day each year. A bargain, on the whole, no? Drop a bunch of cash on flowers, brunch and cards one little day a year and you’re good to go for another 364! It’s like an oil change, but prettier.
So what am I saying here, friends? I guess what I’m saying is that when we’re not conscious of our “why” (in this case, why we might be choosing to celebrate a commercial holiday that fills some of us with dread), it’s easy to lose the plot of who we are and what we value. And from there, it’s easy to find ourselves fastened into a seat in the first-class victim section, on auto-pilot, pushing through some gale-force resentment.
But I like to end on some good news when I can. And the good news as I see it here is that we don’t have to buckle ourselves into anything, just because that’s how we’ve always done it. We can check in with ourselves about how it’s all feeling, and about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We can course-correct when it feels misaligned and stay the course when it feels aligned. Simple, but not easy. The choice is ours.
Whatever, and however you choose to spend your day this Sunday (and all the days after that), I’m wishing you alignment, friends. First and foremost with yourself. Because all that unfurls from there will be clean, true, and worthy of celebrating.
To those of you who’ve been hanging with me here since I first wrote this in May 2025, I hope you’ll enjoy a second helping of this post. As far as leftovers go, I think these re-heated well, and I hope you do, too.
Thank you for the perpetual reminder that there is always another way of being that is available to us.
That short list from your think tank? Someone should put THAT on a card.