I have a good relationship with my mother and with my daughter.
Today I’ve been talking with a friend about the difficulty of celebrating holidays like Mother’s Day, where everything is so fraught and there’s this constant background rhythm of “but what about the people with abusive mothers, what about the people who are infertile” and so forth.
I don’t have any good answers for this. This post is not an epiphany. But I think part of the issue might be the universality and inescapability of the Internet as a public square. I mean, think about Mother’s Day when I was a child. You spend the day at home with your parents, like you do. Maybe you go out to brunch. You telephone your grandma. If you’re missing a grandma, maybe you light a votive candle for her or something else in your tradition.
If you’re a person for whom Mother’s Day brings up painful memories, then you just avoid going out to brunch spots that morning. You don’t call your mom, for one reason or another different reason. It’s not possible to escape the Hallmark noise about mothers, but at least the raucous joy of your peers is muted for you, and you can have a quiet introspective day on your own.
But with the Internet, there is no quiet introspection; it is a binary. You can either have Everything All Of The Time, or you can have Nothing and sit in radio silence, alone. I think this goes triple during the pandemic; so much of our socialization is now online that shutting off the Internet feels like dying.
And along with that, I think there’s a subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to dial back our public-to-internet celebrations. But I think the distinction matters, between “I am celebrating in my own space” and “I am forcing you to celebrate in your space.” It’s just that the Internet blurs that distinction.
I don’t have any good answers for this. Like I said up top, there is no epiphany here.
- I love my mom.
- My daughter is the light of my life.
- I see the friends who have complex feelings today, and I respect their decisions regarding how to interact with the Internet during the month of May.
- GOTO 1.
Bonus content: this cat and her possum!
Emilybook 