No Mother’s Day for me

A week late, I know, but Nancy Nall’s column on Mother’s Day triggered this.

I’m glad I don’t have to write a column. But I have to suffer through gratuitously saccharine Mother’s Day references in our local papers and even on the Psychedelic Psunday programme on local hard-rock radio.

You could probably divide M.D. columns into two categories—those that are just out and out gush from the get-go (“You were always there …”); and Belated Appreciation (“I never realized how important you were …”), triggered either by the birth of one’s own children or the death of Mother Aforesaid.

One of these days I should write something for those of us with hateful mothers we do not remember fondly and that we do appreciate, unfortunately, for what they really did for us.

My mother had a sad and loveless life herself, but she hurt her five children a lot. Just this past March I was sitting in an Arctic Circle in a suburb of Salt Lake City while my fifteen-year-younger sister told me yet more horror stories—really horrible movie-of-the-week stuff our mom did to her. So no Mother’s Day sob stuff for her.