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Happy Crappy Mother's Day!

Posted: 05/08/10 02:40 PM ET

It's Mother's Day time!

Yay!

I guess. I don't know.

I do know that about this time of year, I find myself feeling for all those whom the good Lord saw fit to birth unto a woman no more suited for motherhood than June Cleaver was suited for professional mud wrestling. All around them others are waxing rhapsodic about their loving, tender, wise, resourceful, self-sacrificing Exemplary Mother, while they're stuck remembering how their loser witch of a mom used to feed them cat food, or lock them naked outside in the rain, or in some other way make clear they were basically crazy.

To we who belong to the Happy Crappy Mother's Day Club, I say this: besides selling mountains of over-priced, landfill-filling sentimentalized detritus, the reason d'etre for Mother's Day is to fortify people's desperate need to forever tell themselves that they had mothers who weren't self-centered cretins with no more business raising children than a fish has raising gerbils. They must tell themselves that they had a good mommy, a happy childhood, a wonderful family life, and that growing up everything for them was fabulous and sunny and happy and healthy. Because if they don't tell themselves that -- if for a moment they allow themselves to feel what an unhappy, crappy mother they had -- then very quickly things start getting very bad for them indeed.

They know if they so much as go near that thread, the whole sweater will fall apart.

Hah! Losers.

Better to look in your wallet and know that you're broke, than to never look in it and insist that you're rich.

Happy Crappy Mother's Day, you brave and unswerving adherents to the truth!

And to those of you lucky enough to have been blessed with a sane, good mother? We charter members of the HCMD club embrace you, sincerely wish you a wonderful Mother's Day, and trust that you'll forgive us if we step out of your Mother's Day celebration just the slightest bit early.

Join Facebook's Happy Crappy Mother's Day group!

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Related posts o' mine are: I Just Found Out My Mother Died -- Five Years Ago and Unhappy? Reject Your Loser Parents.

Visit John's blog at JohnShore.com

 
 
 

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12:28 AM on 05/10/2010
Refreshing to hear someone telling the truth!

I used to feel guilty about walking away from the craziness I was born into, but not anymore. If your "loved ones" do nothing but hurt you and make you feel bad about yourself, what to speak of abuse and neglect, you should take the hint and vote with your feet. Life's too short to do otherwise.
01:36 AM on 05/11/2010
Welcome to the Donna-Reed-Free-Zone.

Letting go rarely seems the wise thing to do, if all around us we're told that if really is possible to gain Perfect Family Nirvana, if only we try harder. All while the ones who hurt us won't love us enough to change.
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10:37 PM on 05/08/2010
Mr. Shore, you're symbolically re-fanned. I'm SO a member of that club, and thanks for almost being a mind-reader. So far as I know, nobody had ever taken that angle. Thank you so much.
07:44 PM on 05/08/2010
All praise your word, John! I was abandoned, by my mother, to several years of sexual abuse by my father. Forgiveness has not arrived yet, for either of them. In return, I have abandoned them. I can discuss them dispassionately but not delve into an emotional recital.

Now I give my loving nature to those who need my attentions just because I can. All devotions to a perfect family mystify me.

And Hallmark mines a perfection that rarely exists. What a "Mother lode"!