Mother's Day without Mother? Meh.

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This post was originally published on the now-defunct Los Angeles Moms Blog in May 2010, and has been lightly re-edited for posting here.

I hope you had a lovely Mother's Day. It was pretty much an ordinary Sunday for me.
Due to certain oddities of the calendar and the custody schedule, it seems that more often than not, my husband's kids have been with him on Father's Day...and on Mother's Day. I feel a little strange about that. In the nearly five years I've been married to their father, I've tried my best not to step on the the toes of my stepchildren's mother, and I'm ambivalent about whether I expect or want any special attention from her kids on Mother's Day - I don't really feel entitled to it. I love my stepchildren - they're with their father and me two nights a week and every other weekend and are a huge part of my life, and I'd like to believe they feel the same way about me. But we all know I'm only "like a mother" to them, and it doesn't seem right to expect the treatment due to the person who is their mother on Mother's Day.

Then again, I don't really get much of that treatment from my own son on Mother's Day either, and the fact that he's grown and living three thousand miles away is only part of the reason why. I'm actually pretty satisfied that my son appreciates me year-round, and while I'm happy to get a phone call or instant message from him wishing me a Happy Mother's Day, I'm not wounded if it doesn't happen. (I'll probably hear from him a day or two later, in any case.) Like author Anne Lamott, I didn't raise my son to celebrate Mother's Day...although, as she discussed in a May 2010 article for Salon.com, her reasons for that choice were more political than mine. She reflected on an ambivalence about the place of mothers in society that's much bigger than my own, and suggested that

"No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children."

And when it comes to "people who mother our children," the fact is that sometimes those people aren't their mothers, and that may be because sometimes their mothers aren't around to do that job any more.
Hope Edelman, author of the motherhood memoir The Possibility of Everything, lost her mother to cancer at the age of 17 and may be best known for her earlier book Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss. I read that book eleven years ago, just after my own mother died, and it helped me come to terms with my entry into the Motherless Daughters Club. In a post on her personal blog, Edelman talked about Motherless Daughters Day (observed on the Saturday before Mother's Day since 1996) and how it's helped her deal with not having her mom around on Mother's Day:

"(F)or many years Mother’s Day was such a dark spot on my calendar. Without a mother to honor on that day, I felt there was no place for me to fit. In the seventeen years since Motherless Daughters was first published, I’ve heard from many readers who’ve felt and still feel the same way. Even those with children of their own feel the absence of their mothers more acutely on the day set aside specifically to remember the ones who birthed us. The initiative for a national Mother’s Day was started in 1907 by a motherless daughter who was looking for a public way to honor all mothers, but somehow evolved into a day to honor only those who are living (and able to physically receive bouquets of flowers and Hallmark cards). But where did that leave women whose mothers had died or were otherwise absent?"

I was lucky enough to get a mother-in-law who's like a mother to me when her son became my second husband in October of 2006 (and I became like a mother to his daughter and son). But on the day when we're expected to make moms the center of attention, it still feels odd to be unable to do that for mine, while at the same time I'm not sure how much I really want the kids in my life to that for me.

But if you wanted the kids in your life to do that for you, and you have your mom around so you could do that for her, I hope it was a wonderful Sunday for you all.