It’s a beautiful Sunday morning, and you just woke up. Normally, you would take your time getting ready and have a proper start to the one day a week you have to yourself. But no, not this Sunday.
This Sunday, your parents rush you to get out of bed and join them on the most painful of missions. This particular holiday is so daunting that it leaves you begging to just go back to doing your usual Sunday chores. This Sunday is the worst of all holidays: Mother’s Day.
You miss an hour of sleep just to go to a crowded brunch spot that serves nothing but burnt eggs and cheesy maternal tributes. But your family is only getting started and, right after brunch, you’re forced to spend your whole afternoon strolling through a park instead of happily doomscrolling in your room.
If you’re from one of those families that gives the mother breakfast in bed, you’ve got an even worse fate. Instead of just being forced to eat a lousy breakfast, you have to cook one yourself. And poor Mom has to pretend to like it and then deal with the destruction that you inflicted on her kitchen.
But the worst part of Mother’s Day is all the gifts. Instead of just loving your mother, you have to express your love in the form of material goods.
With all this emphasis on spending, one has to wonder who this holiday is actually for. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not actually for mothers. Mother’s Day is incredibly valuable to businesses, meaning we aren’t even really putting our mothers first. According to the National Retail Federation, spending on Mother’s Day is expected to reach an all-time high of $38 billion this year.
The truth is that capitalism is the true spirit of Mother’s Day, not thankfulness. After all, if you aren’t grateful enough to the woman who brought you into this world to buy her a bouquet and a Hallmark card, what kind of person are you?
Mother’s Day isn’t just hard on gift-givers. It gets even worse for people who want children but can’t conceive or have children that passed away.
Think about it: You’ve been trying for years to have a child, or the one you had just recently passed away, and now, for a whole day, you have to see all the mothers being celebrated with their children. Moreover, millions of women are unable to conceive, so I think it’s unfair to force this group into more grief just to honor the 85 million mothers in the United States.
We all love and value our mothers (on most days). Mother’s Day, however, is certainly not the best course of action to honor them. Of course, there’s likely to be quite a few restaurants and retailers who might have a different opinion.
