I grew up mostly without Mother\u2019s Day\u2014I would say \u201cHappy Mother\u2019s Day\u201d to my Mom, and I suppose I gave her a card some years, but it was clear, in the little microculture of our household, that Mother\u2019s Day (and Father\u2019s Day) were made-up Hallmark Holidays, and that we shouldn\u2019t be participating in the commercialization of the family unit. Or picking a single day to express our respect and gratitude. We weren\u2019t a big gift-giving family generally, to be clear, and my mother\u2019s allergies meant that she didn\u2019t really like having flowers in the house. My family unit was and is supportive and generally terrific, but we\u2019re not much given to sentiment.\r\n
Later, I became aware that Mother\u2019s Day was actively difficult for a lot of people, whether it was because they felt pressured to express emotions they did not feel, or because they wanted to express deeply-felt emotions to someone who was absent, or for a variety of other issues. I also became more aware that a lot of people experienced it as a mildly irritating obligation, too.\r\n
I also eventually learned about Anna Jarvis, whose tireless efforts to create a national day to honor mothers were ultimately successful, and whose subsequent tireless efforts to abolish Mother\u2019s Day were ultimately unsuccessful. The history of the official Mother\u2019s Day is an appallingly, amazingly American story of good intentions and capitalism and race and war and\u2026 oh, it\u2019s just America, is what it is, for good and ill.\r\n
But yesterday what I was thinking about was that being on-line, and particularly being on social networks (and particularly<\/i> being on that particular one that is so ubiquitous among America\u2019s great middle-aged) made it difficult to dismiss Mother\u2019s Day as a Bad Idea. Yes, it\u2019s awful for a lot of people and probably bad for the country as a whole (if good for the economics of brunch places, and I do like brunch), but there\u2019s also an awful lot of people who have delightful days with their offspring and\/or parents, and an awful lot of people who find it an occasion for solace or beauty or love. Or hope. Or community. Or whatever\u2026 it\u2019s a mess, is what it is, but it\u2019s a mess that really does bring an awful lot of joy to an awful lot of people.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger changes his mind, at least partway.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20747,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746\/revisions\/20747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}