Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day tomorrow just in case some of you had forgotten. Don't know how you could with the endless amount of advertising telling you that you should spend up big on your mother.

Mother's Day for me is far more important than my birthday, Christmas or Easter. Not because I might get a gift, which is in fact the last thing I expect or want, but because it's the one day I can say is MINE. Invented just for me because I'm a mother now. I can refuse to get out of bed, cook, clean and even ignore the pleas for attention. I think of Mother's Day as the one day I can make my children and husband grateful for everything I do by being as ignorant and unavailable as possible.

I read and hear about all the celebrity mum's who get labelled supermum's because they can afford to hire a few full time nanny's while they continue the comparatively easy job of earning a living. They're all like "being a mother is the most wonderful thing in the world and my kids are the most precious things on earth". It's true, they are the most precious things on earth and they are the most wonderful thing that will ever happen but being a mother is not the easiest thing to do.

A few years after I had Maya I stumbled across a book called "The Heartache of Motherhood". It was written by a woman who used to be a magazine editor. After I found it I wanted to meet that woman and kiss her and hug her and tell her I loved her. She had very succinctly put into words all the feelings I had about motherhood. She told me it was ok to admit that you sometimes didn't like it. One line stuck in my head and it went something like this: I love my children and would walk in front of a bus for them but I don't always like being their mother.

She had written about her career, marriage and her desire to have children and how all those things changed after she became a mother. She had four children in the 60's and 70's, she baked, made clothes, became a tuckshop lady, worked from home and did all the right things but she never felt fulfilled ever again as a person in her own right. She started to despise her husband because his life went relatively unchanged but hers had been irrevocably altered.

She wrote about how people only ever told her how wonderful motherhood was and that it was something everyone had to do. No one ever told her how difficult doing the most simple things would become - taking a shower, writing a letter, talking on the phone, grocery shopping, sleeping. No one ever told her that shops were not designed to make it easy for women with children pushing strollers or that your children might scream and howl at all hours of the night or that you would never again enjoy a warm meal or a whole glass of wine or talk of anything that wasn't baby related.

After her children all left home and developed their own successful careers and had their own children she left her husband. In her day they didn't do much of anything to help out (sometimes still don't) and she despised him too much for the changes he hadn't made. They remained friends but things had been altered and they would never again be the same for her.

So when Mother's Day rolls around tomorrow I will be lying in my bed with the blankets pulled up and my ear plugs in and I will ignore. I will take all the mothering I give to others and savour it for myself. I will join my mother and sister for breakfast and leave my children at home. I will go to the movies and I will ignore the dishes, the washing, the mess and the screams. For one day I will be oblivious to the demands and the howls - at least until I get home from the movies. The peace only lasts for as many hours as you can stay away from home. I miss them when I'm not with them but at the same time I sometimes just wish they would hire a nanny.

Happy Mother's Day to all the mother's I know. You've done a fantastic job and you can give yourselves a pat on the back for making it this far, however far that is. It's ok to sometimes just sit and cry or scream into your pillow or even to tell your kids to shut the hell up for five minutes. You're only human after all.