Mother’s Day 2020

My mother has been a copy editor for as long as I've known her, which is to say, my entire life. She has an eagle eye and an encyclopedic recall of grammar and punctuation. She is also a walking example of the futility of trying to teach children anything. Her oldest son saw how she worked and he learned that commitment to detail is how to get ahead. Her youngest came away with the lesson that grammar is pointless to learn because he already lived with a copy editor in the house.

It's with this in mind that Mother's Day, this coming Sunday, is especially meaningful for Mom, coming as it does with a little punctuation controversy. Where to put the apostrophe? I've seen the holiday written as Mother's Day, Mothers' Day and even Mothers Day. People are famously bad with apostrophes (particularly sign makers) so it's not surprising that the one in Mother's Day gets used in many ways but there is a clear correct version. Anna Jarvis, who campaigned for Mother's Day in the early 20th century as a memorial for her own mother, was insistent on the singular possessive. The day was intended to be a celebration of your mother first and is secondarily a celebration of motherhood in general. 

Many people are against Mother's Day, stating that the celebration of it is insensitive, cruel and, as this article states, promotes the lie "that those with children are more important than those without." The article makes some good points about the smugness of parents compared to non-parents but I don't understand what any of them have to do with Mother's Day. "Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished," says the article, disturbing indeed. It is offensive to think that non-parents are less than. Children are like anything else, if you are looking for them to make you complete, you are missing something that no one can find but you. I hope that statistic isn't accurate—and I wish the author had cited the study as it is remarkable to get ninety-eight percent of people to agree on anything and I don't understand how someone could "secretly feel" something by announcing it in a public poll—but I do know that parenthood is too often treated as the culmination of a meaningful life, which is simply untrue. Schopenhauer, who seemed to find a way to live a full life without children, felt that parenthood was insane and that no one in their right mind would willingly enter into it. The species' will to continue fooled our intellects into picking mates that we would never choose for ourselves but because they have attributes that we lack—not to complete us but to created balanced children. Being Schopenhauer, he concluded that this is why parents so quickly fall out of love with each other. Now that the job of procreating is finished, our intellects regain control only to find we have a mate we can't stand. 

Mother's Day is seen as the symbol for this parenting arrogance and the line of thought is that if you don't have children and want them, seeing people celebrate Mother's Day may make you sad. If you don't want children, Mother's Day is society condemning your choice. If your mother has passed, the day may upset you. If your mother was terrible, the day might make you angry. I am not insensitive to any of these plights but I can't help but feel that making them about Mother's Day is a way for making Mother's Day about you when, according to the holiday's founder, it is only about one person—your mother. Applied to other holidays, this line of thinking exposes its inanity. I've been in a bit of a funk since April 22, Administrative Professionals Day, because I am tired of being constantly reminded that society believes administrative professionals are more important than those who are not. I chose to be a copywriter for a software company because it is my path, not everyone needs to become an administrative professional. Further, come October 12, Columbus Day, is just another turn of the screw that I am not Italian and therefore will never be good enough. I understand that there is real pain when it comes to mothers and parenthood and we should all remember that people's relationships with either of those things are not always positive but turning what is supposed to be a celebration of someone else into a personal insult has less to do with pain and more to do with self-pity. One of the many things my mother taught me is that people are a lot stronger than that. 

However, those who want to cancel Mother's Day have an ally in Anna Jarvis, the woman who fought for it in the first place. By the 1920s, Jarvis was disgusted by the commercialism the holiday engendered and began a campaign to have it removed from the calendar. She has a point. On a normal Mother's Day, $23.6 billion will be spent on flowers, brunches and other gifts, coming to an average of $186.83 per shopper which I, uh, am definitely going over this year because I love my mother the most. At the same time, parents spend $233,611 to get a child from birth to eighteen for an average of $35 a day, going through a Mother's Day's worth of cash every five days for nearly two decades (and this is without college tuition), so perhaps its only fair to balance the books by a fraction once a year. Philosopher Jane English would disagree, saying that children owe their parents nothing because only one of those two parties decided to have you. You don't choose to be born and therefore can't be beholden to any moral contract. 

Your parents make all kinds of decisions for you that you have neither the wherewithal to understand or the autonomy to influence, starting with being born and going right to your name. Studies show, remarkably, that people with names that start with As and Bs get higher grades than people with F names (names that don't start with grade letters have little correlation). My mother named me Nicholas because she thought it was old-fashioned in the same way as my brother's name of Benjamin. There was a faint connection to Nick Carraway, the reflective stranger in a strange land who narrates The Great Gatsby. Had she named me Fitzgerald, for the author of that book, I could be some kind of a flunked-out idiot right now. Richard Gere's parents gave him the middle name of Tiffany. William Faulkner's thought Cuthbert was a good middle name. Harry Truman's parents couldn't agree which of his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman or Solomon Young, to honor with his middle name so they just went with S. If Nicholas is old-fashioned, it has nothing on Mozart, whose parents named him Johann Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Wolfgang is his middle name and he gave himself the signifier of Amadeus, which means "God's love." This seems a little presumptuous to me but if I wrote the Act II finale of The Marriage of Figaro, I'd also conclude that God loves me very, very much.

Jack Nicholson and Eric Clapton both grew up believing their grandmothers were their mothers and their mothers were their sisters. Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon. I am blessed with a wonderful mother-in-law who has a warm laugh and fierce loyalty but that won't stop me from pointing out that if you rearrange the letters of "mother-in-law," you get "Hitler woman."

I agree with English's assertion that children don't owe their parents anything but that belief is misapplied to Mother's Day. I don't get my mom a book or a card or flowers because I owe her, I do it because I like her and want to celebrate her. I've been very lucky to have two terrific parents, two terrific parents-in-law and a host of others who helped make (and continue to make) me into the person I am. I am similarly lucky to parent beside a gracious, kind mother who works hard to make it look easy and will instill our kids with a confidence and fearlessness that the world had better watch out for. There should be days for celebrating all of these people. Mom gets this one. So, let's all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born. Though mine wasn't born too long a time ago, she certainly knows. She always has.