Thanks so much for receiving my words! It's a gift to have them received and acknowledged. And thank you for modeling authenticity in your life! I hope you enjoy your day tomorrow, however you spend it! 💖
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Burning down Mother's Day revolution 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Personally I've rebranded today as "happy inner loving parent day." I'm proud of the ways in which I have learned to nurture and care for myself. Actually it's pretty fucking impressive. I'm going to do something nice for myself today.
For me at least, the mother wound can feel like a big ol' black hole. Thanks for bringing some light into that darkness.
Viva la revolution! And I hope you found just the right way to celebrate that inner loving parent of yours! It's a gift to witness your reparenting process...and I'm so glad that these words shone some light into the void (the void, in my experience, has an annoying way of morphing into a wormhole with little notice🕳️💥). Thanks, as always, for being here, friend. 💖💞🌈💞💖
LOL!! Thanks, CJ. I won't quit my day job just yet to become a greeting card creator. But we sure could use cards with more nuanced sentiments that don't perpetuate the mother myth. 🌈
I wasn't here for the previous incarnations of your Mother's Day Tome. I enjoyed what some might call the sacrilegiousness of it, I call it an honest look at this created holiday. I loved my mom but life with my parents was not an easy one althought not a horrible one either. She passed in 2010, my dad in 2005 (but that is a different story) and while I miss them, I am happy that the "STURM and DRANG" of having parents is over. Does that make me a bad person 😀? I dont' think so. A few of my advertising accounts have send e-mails saying that realizing that Mother's Day is a dificult time for some, would I prefer to opt out of Mother's Day ads. WOW! Meanwhile, Happy People Day. Fondly, Michael
Thank you, Michael! Both for reading and for these heartfelt comments. I can relate to having complicated relationships with parents also to feeling some relief over no longer having to weather the storm and stress of it. I think that just makes us human! Happy People Day to you, too! 💞
Keith-Such a thoughtful and psychologically honest piece. I am happy to see that you are reclaiming complexity from sentimentality where commercialized Mother’s Day myth tends to flatten womanhood into sacrifice, nurturance, emotional labor, and moral purity. Historically that narrowing has functioned in deeply misogynistic ways to reduce the feminine to sanctioned caregiving rather than allowing for fully differentiated human lives. You expose the hidden psychic violence beneath the sentimental veneer of compulsory motherhood, inherited gender scripts, unresolved attachment wounds, performative gratitude, and the pressure to conform to roles many people never chose. In many ways, what you are describing parallels the broader hyperreactivity we are now seeing culturally toward ambiguity itself: toward queer embodiment, chosen family, gender complexity, and differentiated expressions of the feminine and masculine. Increasingly, anything outside sanctioned symbolic roles gets treated as contamination rather than variation. Yet living systems survive precisely because they retain enough flexibility to metabolize difference without collapsing into fear or rigidity. Brilliant work. Blessings, Sheila Grace
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and share your incisive comments here, Sheila Grace. The sort of hyperreactivity we're seeing - a kneejerk to suppress or erase any expression anomalous to the rigid patriarchal code of the far right - is absolutely caustic to life itself. And yes, systems survive when they adapt to support evolution! Thank you for consistently writing on this very theme with such clarity and conviction. I appreciate you! 💞
Thank you so much for this; I really needed it right now in particular. <3
Also, I just LOVE the "nunchuck-wielding, gender-bending ninja" image for myself in navigating the icky cultural messages of this day and of motherhood/parenthood/child-bearing in general.
I'm so glad it was helpful for you, right now in particular 💜...and I wish you and your nunchuck-wielding, gender-bending ninja a great day tomorrow, doing whatever feels best for you!
I could go on and on about "St. Mommy Syndrome" but I won't. My own mother has passed, and so I get to simply ignore the whole thing. Same with Father's Day. Lucky me! 🤪
I hear you - I can't say I miss the annual emotional gymnastics required to navigate the Mother/Father Hallmark holidays with regard to my late parents. Thanks for taking/making the time to read a post on something that's a non-issue for you these days - appreciate it, MTF! 💖
Thank you for the perpetual reminder that there is always another way of being that is available to us.
Thanks so much for receiving my words! It's a gift to have them received and acknowledged. And thank you for modeling authenticity in your life! I hope you enjoy your day tomorrow, however you spend it! 💖
YAS
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Burning down Mother's Day revolution 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Personally I've rebranded today as "happy inner loving parent day." I'm proud of the ways in which I have learned to nurture and care for myself. Actually it's pretty fucking impressive. I'm going to do something nice for myself today.
For me at least, the mother wound can feel like a big ol' black hole. Thanks for bringing some light into that darkness.
Viva la revolution! And I hope you found just the right way to celebrate that inner loving parent of yours! It's a gift to witness your reparenting process...and I'm so glad that these words shone some light into the void (the void, in my experience, has an annoying way of morphing into a wormhole with little notice🕳️💥). Thanks, as always, for being here, friend. 💖💞🌈💞💖
That short list from your think tank? Someone should put THAT on a card.
LOL!! Thanks, CJ. I won't quit my day job just yet to become a greeting card creator. But we sure could use cards with more nuanced sentiments that don't perpetuate the mother myth. 🌈
I wasn't here for the previous incarnations of your Mother's Day Tome. I enjoyed what some might call the sacrilegiousness of it, I call it an honest look at this created holiday. I loved my mom but life with my parents was not an easy one althought not a horrible one either. She passed in 2010, my dad in 2005 (but that is a different story) and while I miss them, I am happy that the "STURM and DRANG" of having parents is over. Does that make me a bad person 😀? I dont' think so. A few of my advertising accounts have send e-mails saying that realizing that Mother's Day is a dificult time for some, would I prefer to opt out of Mother's Day ads. WOW! Meanwhile, Happy People Day. Fondly, Michael
Thank you, Michael! Both for reading and for these heartfelt comments. I can relate to having complicated relationships with parents also to feeling some relief over no longer having to weather the storm and stress of it. I think that just makes us human! Happy People Day to you, too! 💞
Keith-Such a thoughtful and psychologically honest piece. I am happy to see that you are reclaiming complexity from sentimentality where commercialized Mother’s Day myth tends to flatten womanhood into sacrifice, nurturance, emotional labor, and moral purity. Historically that narrowing has functioned in deeply misogynistic ways to reduce the feminine to sanctioned caregiving rather than allowing for fully differentiated human lives. You expose the hidden psychic violence beneath the sentimental veneer of compulsory motherhood, inherited gender scripts, unresolved attachment wounds, performative gratitude, and the pressure to conform to roles many people never chose. In many ways, what you are describing parallels the broader hyperreactivity we are now seeing culturally toward ambiguity itself: toward queer embodiment, chosen family, gender complexity, and differentiated expressions of the feminine and masculine. Increasingly, anything outside sanctioned symbolic roles gets treated as contamination rather than variation. Yet living systems survive precisely because they retain enough flexibility to metabolize difference without collapsing into fear or rigidity. Brilliant work. Blessings, Sheila Grace
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and share your incisive comments here, Sheila Grace. The sort of hyperreactivity we're seeing - a kneejerk to suppress or erase any expression anomalous to the rigid patriarchal code of the far right - is absolutely caustic to life itself. And yes, systems survive when they adapt to support evolution! Thank you for consistently writing on this very theme with such clarity and conviction. I appreciate you! 💞
Thank you so much for this; I really needed it right now in particular. <3
Also, I just LOVE the "nunchuck-wielding, gender-bending ninja" image for myself in navigating the icky cultural messages of this day and of motherhood/parenthood/child-bearing in general.
I'm so glad it was helpful for you, right now in particular 💜...and I wish you and your nunchuck-wielding, gender-bending ninja a great day tomorrow, doing whatever feels best for you!
I could go on and on about "St. Mommy Syndrome" but I won't. My own mother has passed, and so I get to simply ignore the whole thing. Same with Father's Day. Lucky me! 🤪
I hear you - I can't say I miss the annual emotional gymnastics required to navigate the Mother/Father Hallmark holidays with regard to my late parents. Thanks for taking/making the time to read a post on something that's a non-issue for you these days - appreciate it, MTF! 💖