On Mothers’ Day (and as a mom I’m well aware that tomorrow IS that day and fully count on being “honored”) we celebrate an impossible ideal. Culture and media as well as our own rose-colored emotions conjure an image of a saintly, cookie baker that resembles almost no one I know. As one drive-by business sign summarized the prevailing attitude, “Mothers are angels without wings.”
As a flesh and blood, flawed and sometimes regretful member of that class, I cringe at such misrepresentations. They both call on me to be what I am not and tend to kick me out of a group to which I belong in spite of my flaws and transgressions. And, by invoking the entirely demystified and slightly immature cherub—in the tradition of the fairy godmother aunts in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty—the superficial stereotypes reduce the mystery, power, real sacrifice and intense and instinctual relationship compounded in mother-and child-hood. Motherhood is miraculous, but it’s not always pretty. Or even kind.
It occurred to me this morning that many of us suspect compassion in general of hackneyed bathos, syrupy sentimentality—and that the formulation of Mothers’ Day is partly responsible. . When someone speaks of loving neighbors and compassion for all sentient creatures, we think too much of Hallmark Mothers’ Day and not enough of . . . something else.
What? What component of love do those flowery cards lack that reduces them from true compassion to kitsch and, even, hypocrisy?
One component is sustainability. On selected days, for fleeting moments, a child or sister or mother, declares a gratitude and recognition that during the rest of their lives—outside the theater of the holiday—is soundly contradicted by “real world” behavior. Everyone shares a tear-filled moment, like the emotion conjured in a tear-jerker film, but no one can carry that sentiment into the everyday. Heck, it may not last through dinner. Leave the theater, buy an ice cream or coffee, and you’re right back in yourself, no permanent transformation accomplished because the experience is based on a fiction.
The frilliest of cards for mothers describe saintly self-sacrifice—without any of the emotions or conditions that made her behaviors sacrificial. The cornball postulate that by becoming mothers women achieve some level of apotheosis belies the moments in any mother’s (or other person’s life) when she (or he) was anything but angelic. And watching the relationships of those who exchange such platitudes, I often experienced a sense of subdivided personality. No doubt there is real feeling somewhere, but on a daily basis it’s revealed as considerably different from the representations on the cards.
Another missing component, then, is honesty.
True compassion, I suppose, detaches from all moments—the celebratory and sacralized as well as the ordinary and secular—and having observed truly but without judgment, accepts and honors, despite what in the course of life have been and will continue to be conflicts, pain, struggle and enduring existential isolation.
In this sense, the humorous card serves as the better vehicle for true connection. In shared laughter, by choosing to recognize what falls short of glory people generate true connection. Of course, it’s quite possible (though difficult) to find (or compose) cards that express heartfelt, real gratitude, but that real sentiment will never hold up an impossible standard as having been met when the recipient will know (almost certainly) that the image in the mirror is a lie. Instead, true sentiment remembers the concrete and recognizes that true heroism occurs among the flawed and the human.
In films, people always tell little boys that true courage is not an absence of fear but a moving forward despite it. Why can’t we tell mothers the same thing? No matter mistakes you have made—and will continue to make—your relationship matters. If you have worked against your grain, suppressed your own desires, bitten your tongue, even over-reacted in fear for the safety of your child, you have been a good mother. And because that’s one key relationship in any person’s life, celebration of whatever it was and preparation to improve whatever will be are worthwhile. So in honor of your true—and imperfect—reality, we will not propose an impossible standard but will take this moment to say we love you anyway. In that way, Mothers’ Day (and holidays like it) could further the quest for true compassion. The teacher who first explained Buddhism to me called it a recognition of “suchness:” the absolute individuality of an entity. He spoke of experiencing this knock-you-off-your-feet insight in response to a dandelion pushing through a sidewalk crack. We can begin that project by acknowledging our real mothers–and children. By rejecting the phony rose for the scrawny but miraculous—and actual—flowering weed.
