Edel Coffey: This will be my second year not buying a Mother’s Day card.
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I subscribe to a few newsletters that I have no business subscribing to, emails from fashion houses like Chanel, fancy hotels like The Ritz in Paris, and luxury stationery companies like Smythson.
I see these emails as a form of online daydreaming, a little starlit tour around an alternative reality, before returning to earth.
A few weeks ago, however, when an email from Smythson popped into my account, I noticed something unusual.
At the end of the email was an opt-out for Mother’s Day content, acknowledging the fact that this particular occasion can be a sensitive time for many people.
If you needed to, you could mute the Mother’s Day noise. What a decent thing to do, I thought.
This will be my second year not buying a Mother’s Day card. Like so many people in 2020, I lost my mother in lockdown.
Even when she was alive, Mother’s Day was a complex day because she suffered for many years with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, which meant I was often sad on Mother’s Day, thinking about what we were missing out on together, or how we might be spending the day if she hadn’t been sick.
I continued to send her a card and flowers or chocolates every year, even though she might not have understood what they meant, because I knew that these things still gave her pleasure.
Mother’s Day can stir up all sorts of feelings and there are lots of reasons, not just death or loss or grief, that can make it a difficult time for people.
It can be a painful reminder to those who desperately want to be mothers, or a hurtful time for those who are estranged from their mothers or who didn’t receive much mothering themselves.
When I worked as a radio presenter, the text lines were always inundated on Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day too), not only with warm wishes and dedications for parents, but also with sad, lonely, heartbroken notes from many people who found these Hallmark days particularly hard to navigate. Mother’s Day for those people was a dreaded time.
Everywhere you looked you were confronted with merchandise, and by extension your own grief, sadness, or conflicted feelings.
And until those greeting card displays were taken down, those windows laden with teddy bears and chocolates removed to make way for the next commercial occasion, it really wouldn’t be safe to leave the house.
Landmark dates are always difficult when you have lost a loved one — birthdays, Christmas, family events, and of course things like Mother’s Day too.
The sentimentality of these occasions can be very triggering, turning the volume up on memories and emotions, even years after a parent’s death. And the potency of that defining, first relationship, how deep those feelings run, means sometimes nowhere is safe.
We can be ambushed by our emotions by something as small as seeing a Mother’s Day display in the supermarket while doing the weekly shop.
To my surprise, the approach of this second Mother’s Day without my mother hasn’t made me sad in the way I expected it to.
I am aware that the pain of losing a parent is somewhat eased for me by the joy of getting to be a parent myself.
I may not get to send a Mother’s Day card this year but I am one of the lucky ones who will receive one.
Any sense of loss I feel is dispersed by the many reasons I have to celebrate, fragmented through the happy prism of seeing my eldest daughter growing to look like my mum.
With the bleakness of the war in Ukraine and the lingering bugger that is covid, I don’t want to be sad and mourning.
I want to try to celebrate her instead, to remember the happy times and what a good mother she was.
So this year, I have found myself trying to remember the good memories of my mum and wondering might there be a way to still celebrate her on Mother’s Day, even though she is gone.
Maybe, I thought, I could buy some of her favourite chocolates, or a little bottle of the perfume she loved but wouldn’t dream of buying for herself (she was an Irish mammy in the truest sense of the phrase).
Or perhaps I could write her a card after all, telling her how much I miss her, as well as how much she has missed, send it off into the universe and hope it might travel the necessary light years to reach some stardust version of her consciousness.
But no. I will probably just think about her on Mother's Day, remember the happy times and allow myself to celebrate her, because the fact remains, whether she is here or not, I will always be her daughter, and she will always be my mother.
