This weekend, we will collectively scramble to buy flowers that will wilt by Tuesday, book brunches at restaurants that have tripled their prices, and post tributes on Instagram that our mothers will screenshot and send to their friends on WhatsApp. It’s Mother’s Day. And with the greatest respect one day is nowhere near enough.
I do not believe in a single day to celebrate mothers. Because if you are lucky enough to have an exceptional mother, she deserves to be acknowledged on a random Wednesday in October just as much as on the second Sunday in May. And if you are lucky enough to be a mother, truly lucky, knowing that so many women desperately wish they could be, then you also know that motherhood is the most relentless, thankless, button-pushing, heart-exploding job in existence. There is no annual leave. There is no sick day. There is no “out of office.”
I am a housecleaner, a private chef, a personal shopper, a doctor, a counsellor, and a bank. I am, on my better days, a haven of safety and peace. I love my children with every fibre of my being but, sometimes they push every single one of those fibres to their absolute limit, only to look up at me with wide, innocent eyes and ask: “Why do you always yell?”
I will tell you why, my darlings. I will tell you why.
No one tells you the truth about motherhood. We are sold a myth. A soft-focus, linen-clad, laughing-in-a-field fantasy, when the reality is guilt if you work and aren’t home enough, worry that lives permanently in your chest, anxiety that spikes every time a teenager learns to drive. It is a physical pain watching your child suffer, and a strange, grief-adjacent sinking feeling when they start to become independent. You spend years wishing they would tie their own shoes and then one day they are behind the wheel of a car at midnight and you are awake at 1am listening for the front door, heart in your throat.
And then someone wise says to you, “Small kids, small problems. Big kids, big problems.” And you think why didn’t anyone tell me this at the start?
We are told, with great confidence, that we can have it all. Mothers. Nurturers. Career women. Absolutely. But the part they leave out is that we do all of this while carrying the full mental and emotional load of the household. The invisible spreadsheet in our heads that tracks the dental appointments, the permission slips, the who-needs-new-shoes and what’s-for-dinner. And as we get older, we get to add the menopausal load on top, because apparently, we as women do not already carry enough.
We put everyone before ourselves. Every single time. I see it most clearly in my own mother.
My mother is a remarkable woman who, in another life, would have been an academic or have a high-flying career, as she has the mind and the discipline for it. Instead, she made sacrifices that she never once framed as sacrifices. Even now, even when she is unwell, she calls and says, “come and collect the food I’ve cooked.” Nobody asked. She just cooked.
This week I watched her, sick and tired, fussing over us still worrying, still giving. And it struck me with full force: being a mother never stops. Not even when your children are grown and have their own children. Not ever.
The Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran wrote: “Mother: the most beautiful word on the lips of mankind.” He also wrote that the “mother is everything — consolation in sorrow, hope in misery, strength in weakness. That he who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly”.
Gibran was right. So, Mum, thank you. I could not do life without you. There are not enough words, not enough brunches, not enough flowers. You are the person I call first. You are the standard I hold myself to and constantly fall short of. You are extraordinary, and one Sunday a year does not come close.
And to my own beautiful, chaotic, beloved children I love you more than life itself. I would walk through fire for you. I would fight lions.
But if you could occasionally do the dishes and fold the washing, I would probably love you just a little bit more.
Happy Mother’s Day to every woman carrying the load seen and unseen, celebrated and overlooked. You deserve every day.