Mamas Day

M. Andrew Barton Mothers’ day journal entry
I was engaged in some recreational activities with my brothers and friends when a commercial came on. It was for some flower company encouraging us to purchase exorbitantly priced pieces of formerly living plant life to give to our mothers for the celebration of Mothers Day.
Mothers Day is a good idea. Many people overlook the job done by mothers in raising children and providing them with guidance. Of course, there are some cases where this may not apply. I have often wondered how people who have had abortions feel on Mothers Day. Dead flowers seem like an appropriate gift. Preferably something dried out, with the petals falling off, and possibly diseased.
Anyhow, in our case, Mom died of cancer back in 1995. My Dad ended up remarrying before he discovered the woman he married, Arlene, is a raving lunatic with an insanely jealous streak. How jealous is she? Well, for starters, she cut Mom out of all the pictures she was in with dad and replaced them with pictures of her. That is just stupid. There is no polite way to put it.
She also gets upset whenever we kids or Dad talk about Mom. She behaves more like Mom & Dad had a bitter divorce but he is still not over Mom. Arlene desperately wants all the acclaim of being “mom” and the “beloved wife”. This desire is undercut by the antipathy all my siblings and myself feel for her.
Still, if she does not receive a gift for the social construct called Mothers Day then it is Dad who will pay the price. She will do what she does best and make his life absolutely miserable. So I gave in to the pressure of advertising and decided to purchase a card for her.
That creates a delicate situation. I definitely did not want to indicate I regarded her as my mother in any way, shape, or form, but I still have to give her a card. I went to a store to purchase a card. Advertising is huge, so the number of Mothers day cards is huge. The store had rack after rack of cards expressing sentiment like “You are the most wonderful mother in the world” or “You have been my inspiration in life” and so forth.
Those just wouldn’t make the cut. I did not want to say that, even in the soulless, almost meaningless jargon of pop culture mother love as seen in the various brands of greeting cards.
Finally I found the perfect card. It never addressed her as mother. It did not indicate she was the inspiration for my life or success. In fact, it could be taken a couple ways. The front simply said, “You are special”.
Special contains double meaning in today’s society. It has become accepted cant for a person who is disabled in some way, and that way is frequently mentally. Thus the card indicated one thing to her…that she is loved and liked…and another to all the rest of us. Namely, that she is unloved and unliked. It is also faintly insulting.
It is a deliberate attempt to participate in a part of culture that is ritualized into a commercialized, meaningless and emotionless expression of gratitude. I believe the card I found illustrates my feelings exactly, both towards Arlene and also towards the ads that demand we spend 5 bucks for a piece of cardboard and 50 bucks for a few dead plants to ensure the object of our love and affection feels appreciated