THE TRAUMA OF MOTHER’S DAY

By Lisa A. Hatton

Mother’s Day is almost here and card shops, florists, retailers and restaurants are all promoting the big day. They will advertise in local papers and those same papers will carry testimonials of how much Dick or Jane love “Mom” and how wonderful are all her virtues.

The administrator of www.ramsheadwriters.ca was reticent about including a darker piece of fiction of mine on the Mother’s Day page of my writing group’s website. I told him not all people view Mother’s Day with love and fond remembrance. When later recounting that conversation to a friend, she thanked me for acknowledging that fact.

She had been nine when her mother walked out of her life and left her and three siblings with their father, with no goodbye and no explanation. Within a year, the hired housekeeper became their stepmother. When my friend was 16 or 17, the absent mother returned, but the love and trust of daughter for mother did not. “I hated buying a Mother’s Day card. It felt so phoney,” she told me.

A middle-aged brother and sister grew up with a mother who was paranoid schizophrenic. Their memories of “Mom” hold the child’s terror of the abnormal; her absence when she was hospitalized, her socially unacceptable behavior, her loss of memory from electric shock treatment, and some episodes of irrational violence. Her son ignores Mother’s Day.

Another female friend was sexually abused as a child, by a male relative, but still feels the betrayal of a mother who never protected her. She does not go to visit her on Mother’s Day.

I have a cousin whose mother gave her up for adoption, when she was six years old. What does that cousin really feel about her mother? And I know another female who suffers from bi-polar disorder and finds parenting her sons difficult. What do those boys truly think come Mother’s Day?

Some of us have the June Cleaver kind of mother, and she will be adored and cherished. But some of us don’t, and I hereby wish to acknowledge there are people who think of “Mom” with pain, or fear, or a sense of betrayal and their truth is that they do not want to celebrate Mother’s Day.