Motherless Day
I bought a Hillary Clinton hoodie shortly after she was defeated in the 2016 election and have been on the Democratic Party e-mailing list ever since.
I don’t donate money to the Democratic Party these days but I don’t mind being on the list because it is nowhere near as obnoxious as the Republican email list I used to belong to out of morbid curiosity.
I figured I would get at the very least a blog post or two out of subjecting myself to the frantic appeals of the GOP under Herr Trump but it ultimately proved way too toxic and bad for my mental health.
The Democratic email list is much less obnoxious. It’s downright sensitive at times, as when it sent out an email acknowledging that Mother’s Day could be stressful for some people so if you wanted, you could opt out of receiving Mother’s Day emails.
I am one of those folks for whom Mother’s Day is inherently a stressful time. I was abandoned by my mother when I was two years old, something that scarred me irrevocably and left me feeling perpetually unworthy.
After all, your mother is supposed to be the person in your life who loves you the most and never gives up on you. If she chooses not to have anything to do with you, then why would anyone else?
I live in perpetual fear of rejection and failure in no small part because of a formative rejection that will haunt me until my dying day, particularly since I sought out a relationship with my biological mother as an adult, when I felt secure enough emotionally to risk getting hurt all over again and after a deeply depressing weekend in Saint Louis where all of my worst fears about her were confirmed, she abandoned me a second, decisive time, although according to my younger brother she didn’t forget about me completely because she apparently considered suing me for slander because I wrote about being abandoned in my 2009 memoir The Big Rewind.
Moms and motherhood are sacrosanct in our culture. There’s a reason it’s mom, the flag and apple pie and not dad, the flag and apple pie. We assume that men being men, a good percentage of them are either going to go out for a pair of smokes when their child is two years old and never come back or be altogether shitty dads.
It’s considered much rarer for mothers to abandon their children, in part because of pregnancy and childbirth, babies have an infinitely more intense and important physical relationship with their mothers than their fathers.
It’s lonely being a motherless child and a motherless adult because you don’t have the company of your mother, of course, but also because it can feel like you’re the only person in the history of the universe who doesn’t have a close, supportive relationship with your mom.
Mother’s Day is particularly difficult for us motherless masses. We’re never allowed to forget, for even a moment, that mothers are saints and angels and the best of us, even as we have ample personal evidence to the contrary.
So I appreciate something as seemingly minor as an email list for a political party acknowledging the painful truth that celebrations of motherhood can be agonizing for people who grew up with a huge, mother-sized and shaped hole in their lives.
True, the Joe Biden email list was sensitive to my formative trauma precisely because it’s political (in every sense) and also wants my money (spoiler: they’re not going to get it) and while I didn’t opt out of mother-themed emails I wish more people and institutions would follow in its path and make us mother-less survivors of parental abandonment feel less alone and more seen.
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