First of all, if you’re my mom, please stop reading.
Okay, moving on! Like a lot of people, I have a complicated relationship with Mother’s Day.As a kid, I felt like we, my sisters and I, had to make up for whatever mistake in gifting my dad would inevitably make, leaving us forever scrambling for and failing at getting her the right thing. I mean, could a macaroni necklace really ever replace a lifetime’s worth of equal household labor from my dad? I don’t know, but we tried.
Then as we got older, we found ourselves endlessly schlepping from one overcrowded brunch spot to the next, year after year, secretly wondering if anyone, least of all our mother, was really enjoying it.
When I became a mom, a not-so-small part of me thought this should let me off the hook a little, not from celebrating my mom OF COURSE, but at least from having to plan or do anything beyond the borders of my own couch? Because, you know, it’s my day too now. While it may be a nice change of pace for my mom to have her adult kids shower her with attention and gifts for a few hours and then return home to her clean, quiet house afterward, it’s exactly the opposite of that for me. Instead of spending the morning watching Dateline in peace, I’m left to coordinate brunch plans for everyone, including my three kids. Three kids I’ll have to beg to wear that nice shirt grandma got them for Christmas even though they don’t like it and it’s itchy, three kids to chauffeur to a restaurant that’s both expensive and overrated — and god forbid I let them watch something on my phone so I can eat in peace, too— then bring them back all sticky and hopped up on pancakes and orange juice to my messy house. Does that sound relaxing to you?
Because of all this extra work required of many of us on Mother’s Day, some moms are asking grandmas to just step aside entirely and leave the holiday to mothers with a little more skin in the game.
As one mom, Miranda Cornelius, puts it, this is really a holiday for “the moms of the young kids.” In her now viral TikTok video, Cornelius asks if it’s fair for all moms to get equal billing on the second Sunday of May or if we should just focus on the ones “in the trenches,” the moms still battling it out over sleep regressions, changing dirty diapers, and dealing with toddler tantrums. She’s not saying don’t buy your mom flowers or “give them gifts”; in fact, she makes a point of saying that “they don’t get left out” but does emphasize that they have “had their time.” She posted this “unpopular opinion” on April 27 and it already has nearly 150,000 likes.
The comments are predictably divided and inflamed, with some in agreement who say the day is “basically a day we celebrate my MIL” to others furious with the idea that motherhood has an expiry date. “Mother’s Day is for all moms,” says one commenter.
But Cornelius is far, far from alone in her opinion, this Reddit thread with over 350 comments says essentially the same thing, with the original poster complaining that our parents have had decades of Mother’s Days already and that celebrating both her mother-in-law and her own mom over the course of the holiday weekend leaves no time for her.
I get where these moms are coming from, having young kids can be overwhelming and exhausting, and it’s easy to imagine that in your sleep-deprived haze you’ve got it way worse than your own mom or mother-in-law whose days of wiping tiny butts are a distant memory. And because you’re going through it, you feel you should be able to dictate how the day is spent, which I can’t imagine anyone, least of all another mom, would begrudge someone with small kids.
If this holiday is supposed to be an active acknowledgement of the labor of motherhood, then who is more deserving of that than a sleep-deprived, covered-in-other-people’s-spit-up, hormonal-as-hell mom squarely in the thick of it? If she has to organize plans, buy a gift, and gussy up the family for other people, does that cancel out her own desires for the day? At the very least it doesn’t sound like a day off from mom-ing.
On the other hand, becoming a mother crystallized the immensity of what my own mother gave to me, of what she was up against, raising three kids. There’s so much more beauty in this day for me as a daughter because I’m a mother. It makes me want to celebrate her even more.
I sympathize with both moms like Miranda Cornelius who just want one day for themselves and with older moms who may otherwise feel forgotten or underappreciated. It’s obvious, given the righteous emotion on both sides of the argument, that a lot of people aren’t really getting what they want out of this holiday.
My own ideal version of the day involves spending time with my mom and my kids, then ghosting all of them to go do my own thing. They can get in some grandma time and I can do whatever I want to with no one touching me or asking me for a snack. What I’ve learned from the stress of this holiday as a kid is to be very clear about all of this with my husband. He knows what would help make this day relaxing for me, and he can take over figuring out the details. I’m not bailing on my mom, but it might mean renegotiating how we spend part of Mother’s Day. Which is not easy! No one wants to make their mom feel undesired or superfluous.
Ultimately, moms versus grandmas is like so many other imaginary conflicts between two groups of similar people on TikTok — see Gen-Zers versus millennials — a way of creating something out of nothing. Moms should not be beefing on Mother’s Day. You don’t stop being a mom just because your kids are older or even grown, if anything one measly day is the least we can do for a lifetime’s worth of service from our beautiful, loving mothers (just in case mine is reading). Trying to jam our expectations, both communicated and withheld into one day, expecting a few flowers to sum up the value of motherhood and adequately convey how much we mean to our loved ones? Well, therein lies the problem.
Besides, a multigenerational celebration allows one to indulge in a favorite pastime of mine, talking shit about the dads.
Speaking of which, it’s not lost on me that Father’s Day is infinitely less fraught, that we seem to have no trouble approaching that holiday in a straightforward way without arguing over which dads are more deserving of overpriced eggs and pancakes. Talk about that over your brunch this Sunday.
