The flowers in the water, the pictures inked, the chocolates wrapped – in fine tissue paper perhaps, or, a little more tacky, in wrapping paper with the big, red hearts. No matter how lavish the greeting of love should be: Mother’s Day causes stress for young and old children every year. Because a few sweets aren’t enough. Mother should also be given breakfast in bed and taken to the café in the park in the afternoon. Some people will have the question: Does that have to be all?
It may seem strange when men who are not interested in Mother’s Day and whose heads might still be hurting after the Ascension Day party raise this question. But there are also women who can’t do anything with the special day in May. “Finally abolish Mother’s Day!” demanded the “Spiegel” columnist and mother Anna Clauß on the centenary of Mother’s Day in Germany a year ago. Just a few days ago, journalist Ursula Weidenfeld questioned the usefulness of Mother’s Day in the same medium.
If Weidenfeld has its way, you could miss out on a whole series of holidays or commemorations: Labor Day, for example, or Ascension Day, Pentecost and Corpus Christi. They have all lost significance because the institutions behind them – trade unions and churches – have lost members and, as a result, their traction. Nobody among Christians, trade unionists or anyone else will want to miss out on a day off with family, friends or their own garden. But does this really reflect the occasion? The author suspects that most people are not interested in the festival itself: “Without the help of the Internet, who knows what is celebrated in church at Pentecost?”
Become a mother? Rather not!
Weidenfeld also believes that the future of Mother’s Day is debatable: the desire of young people to start a family and have children is decreasing, she writes, citing sociologists. On the other hand, the level of concern for the environment and the future is increasing, as is “the fear of excessive stress” and the worry of being left alone with child care and upbringing. Although all women have a mother, “many no longer want to become one themselves.”
But is that a reason to remove Mother’s Day from the calendar? Those women who have become mothers and have invested a lot of time and energy in carrying the child, feeding it, caring for it, raising it and educating it, cannot help it that others would rather not do this voluntary work. Should they therefore forego the recognition they deserve, even if it only comes to them once a year?
If you get to the bottom of the origins of this day, you will find a number of other reasons to question Mother’s Day and perhaps even to abolish it. Many people may be bothered by commercialization. If small children come to the breakfast table on Mother’s Day with something they’ve made, painted or made pottery (“How nice, an ashtray!”), older children have to invest in at least a medium-sized bouquet of flowers. After all, who wants to give the impression that they want to outweigh their supposedly immeasurable love for their own mother with the ten-euro container from the supermarket foyer? But if you consider that in the 1920s it was the association of flower shop owners who made Mother’s Day, which had already been established in the USA a few years earlier, the “Day of Flower Wishes” in Germany, the matter takes on a flavor: It’s not possible after all about love, thanks and recognition, but just about selling?
Stains on the narrative
The further progression of the story also leaves a few brown spots on the colorful narrative, because the National Socialists practiced a real cult of mothers and made Mother’s Day an official day of remembrance after 1933. There was calculation behind it, as the “Taz” journalist Jan Feddersen noted almost 20 years ago: “The Nazis wanted women as comrades, but even more so as birthing machines. The mother was a saint in the nationalist craze, honored on Mother’s Day, the second Sunday of the year May.” Why, asks Feddersen, is this day still celebrated today?
It is also the resulting associations that bother some mothers, and rightly so. Even without a Nazi past, something yesterday hangs on Mother’s Day. When you think of Mother’s Day, the image of the cricket at the stove inevitably comes to mind. So about the woman who gets up first in the morning, packs the lunch boxes and takes the children to daycare, so that she can then go shopping and put food on the table at lunchtime before emptying the washing machine and vacuuming the apartment. Nobody would come up with the idea of inventing a Mother’s Day to honor a full-time working woman who sometimes spends longer in meetings in the evenings and also works on her career on the weekends while the nanny entertains the children with flowers and breakfast for her motherly service.
This lifestyle also deserves attention and respect. Because is a woman who works and is interested in her own happiness a bad mother? On the contrary, doesn’t it make sense to keep the steering wheel of life in your hand even when the children are still small? Because at some point they will grow up and the woman who has been cooking the food and doing the laundry will have to ask herself how she will shape her future life. Is the man still there? Retirement provision secured? Questions that are rarely discussed on Mother’s Day because that’s when the family is committed to harmony.
“Extremely idealized”
Motherhood is also uncomfortable. But hardly anyone questions the situation of mothers, simply because it is not appropriate and those affected do not complain: “A mother must always be happy, she must love her children, always put her own needs aside and be fulfilled by the role of mother – it doesn’t matter “Under which conditions she drags herself through life,” the Zurich psychotherapist Linda Rasumowsky is quoted in a report on the radio station SRF about women who regret becoming mothers. According to Rasumowsky, the image of the mother is still “extremely idealized.”
This also explains why on a trip into the countryside – with the dear mother in the passenger seat – no one wants to seriously talk about their own mother’s income situation or future options. Nobody wants to see the second Sunday in May as the day of single mothers or working mothers – even though it is that too. That’s what March 8th is for, Women’s Day, which could have been on the calendar for as long as Mother’s Day. However, it did not play a significant role, especially in post-war West Germany, and it was only after reunification, at the instigation of women in East and West, that it gradually gained the importance that it has today. On March 8th, the essential questions will be asked, the uncomfortable but vital ones, about equal opportunities, for example. So you don’t have to do away with Mother’s Day straight away. But it could emancipate itself and change from a day of flowers and chocolates to a day that is closer to life and also more political.
If you were to ask the mothers, many of them would probably deny the need for their own special day: “Don’t bother, children,” they would say, or: “I know you’re thinking of me.” That’s true in most cases. The Bible already specified it – long before the introduction of Mother’s Day. It says to honor mother (and father). In most cases one could agree with this. One should just add: Not just on Mother’s Day, but always.
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