‘Every year I announce I don’t want a gift for Mother’s Day’: Why I mean it

Instead, we get mother stereotypes. It’s either the Perfect Mum – sweet-tempered, immaculately presented, magically good at baking (I’m literally never any those things, unless it’s by accident). Or the Bad Mum – selfish, unsound and drunk by midday on a Monday. Both are about as real as the way my daughter drew me when she was three. There’s me with enormous outstretched arms that make me look like a face on a sizeable couch. Or me as a Super Hero. Precious cards, handmade with love, and of course I treasure them because they make me look good. But I don’t have superpowers, nor am I furniture.

What I am is both an ordinary and complex woman, navigating the highs, lows and mostly very mundane life of a parent. And just as humans are more complex than a stereotype, so are mothers. Even Perfect Mum and Bad Mum are more complicated than their narrative suggests. They are often two sides of the same coin – women who are masking the anxiety that they somehow aren’t enough.

Every year I announce I don’t want a gift for Mother’s Day. It’s a request I first made after my daughter gave me some body wash from a Mother’s Day stall that ended up giving me the world’s worst yeast infection.

But this year what I want is for the ordinary, yet remarkable, mums to be seen. Let’s see the mothers who never cook, or those who fly planes. Or the mums fighting to pay the bills, or are up late at night studying. Disabled mums, outback mums, boss mums, arty mums, LGBTQI mums, “heartily sick of making school lunches” mums. Let’s show mothers in all their exhausted, leaky, courageous realness.

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For me, I am grateful every day that I get to be my daughter’s mother. Through the lens of her love, I have learnt to love myself. She is the beginning of life, the igniting of senses, from her intoxicating baby smell to the touch of her skin and clutch of her chubby little toddler hands – and now, as a teenager, the sound of her laughter. She is a sight I will never tire of. Her love is the only Mother’s Day gift I could ever want. That – and an empty cupboard.

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