Quarterback of the N.F.L.
Reflections on Mother’s Day and great expectations
My father-in-law sent me an article after my husband and I got married, maybe it was when I was pregnant with my first child. He does this — clips out articles out of actual newspaper and brings them over for his son. It reminds me of school, the days when I would have to clip out a news article and bring it to class to discuss; the news, tangible, and so easily balled up and thrown away. I’ve always appreciated that he does this. What a thoughtful thing to do, to say I read this and thought of you.
Before we lived nearby, he would mail them. The articles are usually for my husband — about airports and airplanes, my husband’s line of work, but this one was for me. The article was an opinion piece, fluff, about how women and mothers provide a sense of home. I remember being angry about it, or maybe more accurately unsettled. I didn’t want that to be my value. Suddenly I was married and I was to be set on a pedestal, or a shelf. I had been placed. And my place was to make a place: home. The feminist in me wanted to flush it down the toilet but looking back, part of my reaction I think was fear I couldn’t live up to it.
I get the same uncomfortable reaction when people talk about mothers and the value of mothers and this all kind of comes to a head for me as you can imagine on Mother’s Day. There is a suffocating pressure to live up to a word and the world’s worshiping (and weaponization) of it. I love being a mother, or more accurately, I love my children very much, but I recognize this doesn’t make me particularly special. And I love my own mother. This, too, does not make me particularly special. Lucky, perhaps.
I know, I know. They cynical answer is Mother’s Day is a thing mainly because card companies make a lot of money off of it. It so happens that my mother-in-law had a job writing copy for cards when she was young, so this is a family very big on giving cards for every occasion. And while my own family did give cards, they were given only on birthdays and were always funny — like here is a goofy dog in birthday hat. Here is a wiener dog driving a car. I don’t quite know what to do with the very thoughtful cards my husband and his parents give, with words heavy with feeling. All the time. You might think me ungrateful.
I have been to two separate work events over the years where men got up after a drink or two and thanked the women for the success of the company. Not the women in the company, mind you, but the wives, waiting in the wings, putting up with the husband’s absences, making a home, listening to his diatribes about work, while they, the women, raised the children alone. Like Mother’s Day, you can image this is nails on a chalkboard for me. I do not want to be the woman thanked for my husband’s success. In both instances, these were older men giving the saccharine speech. Maybe what I witnessed was a last gasp of an economic model that no longer works for most. And who am I to belittle the sacrifices women have made, for their families? Who the hell exactly am I to judge?
But then Mother’s Day rolls around and that same unease sets in and I wonder if we will ever be free of the grip of the patriarchy. I wonder if other women have these thoughts around Mother’s Day. Or do they go to brunch, open their cards, and just enjoy it? They say happiness is a choice.
My husband calls me the N.F.L, (No Fun League), because I can find the sad or uncomfortable part of any otherwise happy occasion. The reason we remain married, the saving grace, is he gets me to laugh. Also, he cooks and cleans and loves taking the children to school. Fairly or not, I attribute this to his mother.
