Last Sunday, in the UK at least, was Mother’s Day. An annual contrivance designed for the implicit purpose of exploiting people’s guilt, for not honouring the efforts made by your mother in raising you, by maintaining the capitalist pretence that novelty cards and flowers constitutes as suitable recompense for their sacrifice. That we are incapable of expressing our gratitude without the fascist interventions of corporate greed, looking to exploit the ethically considerate sentiments of those attentive sons and daughters, that are eternally grateful for their mothers formidable parental fortitude. Of course this is only applicable to those that aren’t absent minded and are a contentious of their mother’s, outside of Birthday’s or other significant occasions. But I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated just how difficult raising a child is until I became a father myself.
Being a parent is weird. It’s a largely voluntary occupation with no pay, pension, supplementary benefits or private health care. If anything, being a parent propagates anxiety, sleep deprivation, a sustained depletion of finances and a gradual accumulation of grey hairs. Yet we subject ourselves to deliberate privation of child rearing, to fulfil some biological impulse or out of some selfless notion of imparting wisdom onto a new generation. I don’t know. It does however provide some insight into just how annoying you were as a child.
The incessant questions. The detritus of toy’s strewn across the living room floor. Their unchallenged autocracy over television viewing. The irascible mood swings. Nothing is easy! You Build up a resistance to this behaviour, but not an immunity. You gain an instinctive acuity for dealing with such trying situations. For instance; I now understand why my mother trapped herself in the toilet for extended periods. A fallible strategy I’ve discovered, as my daughter seems to have synchronised bowel movement, that negates any peace I thought I might get. But it’s astonishing to think how my divorced mother, a far more prominent marital status these days, stabilised sanity, even with the burden of raising my sister and I – two adversely disparate personalities – whilst also maintaining a demanding job at a bakery. I can barely tolerate my offspring at the best of times!
We are a generation of men, raised by women, which I believe gives us a maternal propensity absent from many of our own father’s. So for that, as well as nurturing me into the semi-competent adult I am today, I’d like to extend a very gracious “Thank you” to my mother. Despite the failed attempt at replicating the innovative success of their first child, with an inferior sophomore excretion that was my sister. You got it right the first time, Mum.
Game, Complain, Repeat 