If your ovaries have never fired up, not even when Ryan Gosling was looking to spawn offspring, then Mother’s Day means nothing other than a day to avoid eating out and being financially slaughtered by a sentimentally festive mark-up.
For the first year or two of being a step-parent, given your complete lack of parenting awareness, you won’t register anything on Mother’s Day other than the already-well-ingrained desire to honour your own mother.
After a while though, the cumulative effort you’ve invested in cooking, cleaning, driving your step-child to a million things, finding band-aids in emergencies and dealing with relentless laundry may trigger a prickle of annoyance at not receiving any skerrick of recognition on Mother’s Day. It’s possible that you may feel a teensy bit overlooked (notwithstanding your immense gratitude at not having been through that whole childbirth process).
Here are some of the insights into Mother’s Day from actual Mamas to help you understand what you are really missing out on (or not).
The Breakfast
If you wanted cold toast, undrinkable coffee and eggs more rubbery than politician campaign promises, there is no need to yearn for a Mother’s day breakfast, you might simply take the Monday 6am on a domestic airline.
Every biological mother knows that, good intentions aside, the domestic ineptitude of a small child knows no bounds and that the chaos wrought in the kitchen on Mother’s Day is no way compensated by the delivery of a lukewarm meal to your bedside. Someone will undoubtedly fail to turn off the gas underneath the frypan after use, rendering egg-remnants into industrial grade concrete which can never be removed. You can only hope they didn’t use your Le Creuset.
The lack of fine motor skills renders most youngsters unable to control a two litre bottle of OJ, leaving a sticky lake on the kitchen bench.
The void of observational skill or general interest in your wellbeing on the part of a child means they won’t realise you gave up all caffeinated drinks five years ago and will result in your being served up dodgy Earl Grey tea from bags encrusted with pantry-crud and long past any reasonable expiry date.
The gifts
Mother’s Day gifts are a domestic version of the office Kris Kringle, in that they seem to be gifts chosen by someone who does not really know you.
When the children are at an age where they can only source their gifts from the school mother’s day stall, the haul is going to be constrained to cheap $2 gifts that have arrived in container-loads from mainland China. But then, who doesn’t want:
- A fridge-magnet-enabled shopping list so that you can be reminded of your overwhelming domestic responsibilities every time you do some hopeful foraging for wine or cheese
- A miniature sewing kit which is just like every version that comes free in any reputable hotel room. Given busy women are likely to have a tendency to deal with fallen hems with double sided sticky tape or the application of a snappy little staple, they already know that life is too short to actually do mending.
- A torch for your handbag
- Tea-towels as substantial as filo pastry
- Lavender sachets to place in your sock drawer to ensure your feet smell like Nana.
No Day off from being a mother
Notwithstanding the potential for breakfast in bed, there is no get-out-of-jail-free card for women on Mother’s Day. Mothers know they are still going to be surrounded by humans and pets that need to be fed. If you are a working woman, Sunday remains one of the few days where there is a chance to make inroads into laundry or ironing.
Notwithstanding the event, Baby Mamas gain no relief from the Sunday night ritual of trying to find school clothes for the next day and dealing with Friday’s forgotten lunchbox remnants.
So, even though you might feel the stirrings of annoyance at doing a lot of the work of being a mother without all the Mother’s day glory, be reassured that you are not necessarily missing out on anything.
Survival tips
If, as a Stepmother with no kids of your own, you are feeling vaguely slighted by lack of recognition on Mother’s Day, here are some tips:
- By definition, the stepchildren are likely to be at their mother’s house, so pour yourself a glass of wine, rejoice in the absence of any school week prep and watch all the reality TV shows without having to share the remote.
- Eat whatever you want for breakfast, in bed, without the risk of stray egg yolk on your Egyptian cotton.