Am I allowed to say I don't really like mothers day?
Our identity is wife and mother first, woman second, human third. Even saying that sentence feels strange because when I’ve said wife and mother my mouth feels like I’ve already said the word woman.
I spent years trying to erase who I was in order to become who I "aught" to be. I've "lost" years of my children's childhoods to burnout and depression, because the template I was aiming for wasn’t made for me.
It's hard for me to celebrate mothers day when I also feel the collective pain. I can’t turn off the care to manage to passively stand by and watch as the world burns.
Man made suffering, and no, not all men, but man made because men decided man and men means human, you don’t get to pick, so man made suffering, pain, oppression, exploitation, destruction, pollution and femicide, ecocide and genocide. It's hard for me to celebrate mothers day when it’s clear as day that we do not get a say.
It’s hard for me to celebrate mothers day when our care is what’s valued the most about us, but when a man doesn’t care that somehow makes him more rational. Because CARE is too soft, too slow, too "unproductive". Destruction is harder, better, faster, stronger. The less he cares the more we value his opinion. How did man become so disconnected?
Mothers shouldn’t have an ego. Our egos are tied to how much we lack one.
Care for your family, the world OR yourself. You only get to pick one. Two if you’re lucky. If you pick yourself you’re a witch and witches were burned.
We're taught to put ourselves last, until we have nothing left to give, and then we're demonized for being "sickly" and weak, a burden to society. The sin that convicted us was doing too much because we cared, too much, denied ourselves too much, while still somehow never having been enough.
If the world really cared about mothers we would prioritize compassion, care and community over consumption, corporate profits and GDP.
It's hard for me to celebrate mothers day, when the ideal woman is "The Mother", the very ideal from which so many women are trying to free themselves, ironically often in order to heal and become the mother they wish they could be, seriously, trust me.
Mothers day feels like a slap in the face more than a celebration. A small bandaid on top of a big open wound that is never allowed to heal, a wound we are not supposed to even talk about, because apparently we were born this way. It is natural. Born, with an open wound. It wasn’t made by a thousand paper cuts, no, we were born this way, they say.
If we really cared about mothers we would stop fetishizing our sacrifice.
If we really cared about mothers, we would all, not only the mothers, prioritize the wellbeing of all the children in the world, not just our own. If we really cared about mothers we would live in reciprocity with Mother Earth, the Mother of all Mothers. She’s tired too. She’s calling for us to care for her, so she can support us the way she really, really wants to do. Sounds familiar?
If we really cared about mothers we wouldn't value us for our sacrifice, we would value us for the joyful abundance that flows when we’re allowed to be all that we can be, all that we are, when we're untethered and free.
Happy (belated, Norwegian) Mothers Day