A mothers day guest post – Annual Day of Ingratitude
If you caught the Morrison’s Christmas advert this season past, you’ll know that plaintive mothers all around the country were cheering in unison. “Finally!” we thought: “some lovely advertising executive has realised how much stress we go through every year!” The weeks of intensive preparation resulting in a day focused around how late the turkey’s going to be is not really my favourite thing; which is why I sigh in relief when I turn off the hobs of my electric Range cooker for another festive season, and make an inward promise that I’ll never try to cook so much again.
Pretty soon though, we’re about to reach another marker in the calendar; Mother’s Day. Which, after Christmas, is probably my least favourite holiday of the year, if only because it’s really supposed to be about me, and yet still seems to involve a lot of cooking on my part and very little sympathy from everyone else. Every year, I dream for a pristine bowl of muesli, yoghurt and honey served to me in bed with a little bunch of flowers on the side in a vase, but the reality is often quite different.
Like last year’s day of celebratory motherhood for instance, when I woke up to the smell of burning.
A Mother’s Day drama – Annual Day of Ingratitude
My two youngest, the reasons for my being allowed into this hallowed group of mothers, stood in my bedroom doorway. They were triumphantly holding a plastic tray aloft, tottering on their assembled toes, an ominous trail of blackened crumbs littering the floor around them. I just about had time to wrestle the tray from their sticky fingers before the entire delicate situation fell apart completely. The dearest husband was nowhere to be seen either – presumably he was hiding from the childlike carnage.
The kitchen was a complete state, of course. Oven gloves with scorch marks, a broken bowl in the sink, and a great deal of egg yolk dripping down the side of the cutlery drawer. But luckily, super mum came to the rescue as always: I rustled up a few bowls of cereal, popped the last few slices of bread in the toaster and bore a fresh tray upstairs, where the giggling lumps in the duvet wriggled their heads out at the smell of ‘real’ breakfast.
How to get through Mother’s Day
The rest of the day passed in a bit of a haze. I whipped up a lovely veggie lunch for the brood; the man appeared, bleary eyed, from his nap in front of the football; we covered the kitchen table in glue and glitter as my youngest attempted to right his earlier yolky wrongs and make mummy a card.
Eventually I settled down on the sofa at 9pm on the newly christened Mother’s Evening, having semi-successfully aired the kitchen of smoke and noted down two new oven gloves on next week’s shopping list. The little ones were tucked up in bed, the bigger one dutifully attempting to get the glitter out from the cracks in our wooden table – and I really did have to think about whether it was sensible to remind the kids about Mother’s Day when it came around again.
Is Mother’s Day really worth it?
I know that spending Mother’s Day cleaning up the kitchen is only to be expected, but I do sometimes lament about what it might have been. Then again, mums can be a little bit ungrateful too. I did end up with breakfast in bed last year, even if it was cooked by my own fair hand – and I did get to snuggle up with two duvet lumps afterwards. Ruffling their somewhat yolky hair and sweeping up their dropped crumbs is what Mother’s Day is all about – and if I’m perfectly honest, I wouldn’t actually have it any other way.
