Is Motherhood Overrated?

I hate Mother's Day.

Perhaps hate is too strong a word. Okay -- I dislike Mother's Day. A lot. This is churlish stuff, I know, and dangerous -- admitting to disliking Mother’s Day. Almost as dangerous as admitting to a certain ambivalence about motherhood itself.

Let me be clear on this point: about my children I am 100 percent unambivalent: I love and cherish them. They are the greatest gift with which I have ever been blessed and I'd chew bricks to save them heartache, stuff jalepenos up my nose to save them pain. I'd steal or lie or cheat or take a pillow to the middle lane of Interstate 95 and lie down at the height of rush hour for daughter or my son any day of the livelong week, but loving one's children is not the same as loving motherhood.

A person can love her car and hate driving. A child can love her teacher and despise going to school. A woman can love her spouse but dislike and distrust the institution of marriage, can't she? Or is that just me?

Getting back to Mother's Day: before I had children my feelings about this most mawkish of public celebrations was decidedly neutral. Sure, I saw the rank commercialism of the day but I also saw the golden concept buried deep beneath the schmaltz: Everyone should take a moment to thank his or her mother for all she'd sacrificed and done. It didn't seem too much to ask, a national day of forced gratitude, and so I mailed the gaudy card and sent the flowers and made the call and stopped by for dinner if I was in town. I paid tribute where tribute was due.

Oddly enough it took pushing out a kid myself to turn my milk against Mother's Day. My first "real" Mother's Day was a blur -- my daughter was only three months old and I was still in a hormonal hurricane. But by the second one I had her signed up for some little playgroup with a bunch of very sweet and very suburban women in Westchester, N.Y. and I was stunned when, on the Thursday -- not the Friday -- Friday before the Big One, they began rubbing their hands with glee. What are you guys doing for Mother's Day? they asked. Got big plans? Plans?

And on the Monday after, oh the glint in their eyes: How was your Mother's Day? Whad'd you do? What'd you get? My response: 'Huh? How was your Thursday afternoon? How was your Flag Day, your first of April? Why are we even talking about this?'

I hate the way Mother's Day makes some women smug and self-satisifed in their maternalness (I saw a bumper sticker once that read: Motherhood, a Proud Profession. Now, let's be real here, sisters: mothering is one tough job, but a profession it is not. Any untrained, unskilled, uneducated fool can do it, and plenty do.) I hate how Mother's Day makes children feel obligated and women expectant, and how rejected and devalued those expectant women feel if those obligated children do not come through. I hate the way it makes women who want children but don't have them feel lowly. And I hate it makes women who don't have children and don't want them feel monstrous. I hate how it equates womanhood with motherhood and motherhood, the great, ghastly archetype: all-patient, all-knowing, all-sacrificing Mother with a capital M. Ugh!!!

My birthday, on the other hand, I like. My birthday is the one holiday in which I invest, emotionally. Christmas is all about the children, as far as I'm concerned and the less I get the happier I am. Thanksgiving and Easter are about family and friends and New Year's Eve, at this age, is about staying safe at home and counting your blessings for another year and the rest of the holidays are mostly about avoiding the highway crowds but my birthday, my birthday is about me. On my birthday I expect a little something, a little acknowledgement. And since I learned a long time ago, the best way to avoid being disappointed in that expectation was to give it to myself I do: a new hardcover book. A massage, a long, leisurely walk. One of the occupational hazards of being a writer is the push to create meaning in meaninglessness. So I look at the collision of my birthday and Mother's Day and -- I can't help it -- the symbolism begins to clash and clang in my head: Motherhood swallows selfhood. Motherhood consumes identity.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

I've found the best way to get through Mother's Day for me is to focus not on its meaning or its intent or its effect, but on my kids. If I do that, I see what's good about the day -- not the effort my children make to please me on that morning, but the kick they get from making it. The pleasure they get from thinking beyond themselves.

About the Author
Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels 'Taming It Down' and 'Meeting of the Waters,' both published by William Morrow. She is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Greensboro News & Record and the Associated Press. She is currently writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston. Her new novel, Jump At The Sun, will be published in July. For more information visit www.kimmclarin.com.

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