Not All Mothers Deserve To Be Celebrated. I Will Never Celebrate Mine.

“Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path.”

I don’t remember the last time I celebrated Mother’s Day in a meaningful way. In fact, I’d love for the holiday to be wiped off the calendar entirely. 

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To be clear, there are very, very devoted mothers out there. I’m lucky enough to know a few. People who are able to feel such unbridled joy and gratitude for their own mother’s specific brand of mothering are beyond fortunate (and should probably consider celebrating their mothers more than once a year — what a concept). 

The problem, as I and so many other adult children have experienced it, is that marketing, advertising, and society in general seem to assume that everyone’s experience with their mother is one uncomplicated enough to make an annual spectacle out of the relationship; that there is only one kind of mother, and that she — by design — has not done serious, life-altering damage to her children. The assumption seems to be that all mothers are overflowing with love, are perhaps imperfect but do their best at all times and in all situations, and for all of these reasons should be idolized, no matter the impact of their actual mothering. To speak otherwise remains one of the biggest taboos circulating around what we, as a society, think we know about a mother’s love and maternal instincts. 

I remember the early November morning when I found out that my grandmother died. I received a DM from a family member. “Irene passed away last night.” 

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I received the news as though I was told that a complete stranger no longer existed. Irene meant nothing to me, and the event of her death wasn’t even worth a tearful phone call. There is no other way to feel about a woman who, in 1980, kicked me — her first infant grandchild — out of the only home I’d known, along with my teenage parents, one of whom was her postpartum daughter. 

I was too young, too tiny, to remember this event. But I do remember her penchant for corporal punishment. One of my earliest memories of Irene was when she slapped me for enjoying myself at New York’s Forest of the Dozen Dads watershed and recreation site. I was 5 years old, writhing and squirming in what must have been a creek or a babbling brook, my little legs kicking and splashing in the running water. To Irene’s mind, children were to be seen and not heard. When her sharp hand made contact with my bare skin, I sat still for the rest of our time at the park. It’s been 40 years since that moment, and I’ve been unable to remember her differently. 

As I got older, I learned that Irene was a serial abuser who craved emotional, physical, and financial control and domination at all costs, with her own husband, children, and grandchildren at the mercy of her whims unless and until contact was severed. 

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My understanding of my family’s long and unfortunate history is that my grandmother also suffered at the hands of her own parents. My heart hurts for what she must have been through, and I do have extraordinary empathy for Irene — and anyone — who was put in a position to have to survive their childhood.

But while the awful parenting she experienced was not her fault, it was absolutely her responsibility to do better by her own children. My grandmother’s active decision to pass the dysfunction on to subsequent generations, like an heirloom no one wanted, is nothing short of inexcusable. 

It’s impossible to imagine that women like my grandmother were what Mother’s Day founder Anna Jarvis had in mind when she led the movement to commemorate the first Mother’s Day in 1908. 

I began this essay with a discussion of my maternal grandmother because of the way her legacy has impacted nearly every corner of my family. This is how intergenerational family dysfunction works. Every person in my family has struggled, in our own individual ways, to move forward from the unfortunate hand we were dealt, with some of these life stories nothing short of tragic and devastating.

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I haven’t spoken with my own mother — Irene’s daughter — in over six years. This is not a decision I made lightly, and many mothers — according to the therapeutic circles in which I have participated — often leave no other alternative. Too many mothers ask their children to set themselves on fire to keep Mom warm. It needs to be better understood that no adult child cuts off a healthy maternal limb (ask me how I know). 

My relationship with my mother — when we had one — fluctuated across a spectrum that ranged from somewhat stable and manageable to downright dysfunctional. As a child and straight into adulthood, I was never not contending with her toxic narrative of who she believed I was as a person: a selfish and thoughtless young woman with the nerve to create a life on my own terms and to speak my truth. It would seem, at times, that she was simply unable to like me as a person, a trait she undoubtedly learned from her own mother. Irene shamelessly ran each of her four daughters through the wringer. Control, manipulation, domination, and lovelessness were features of their upbringing, much like Irene’s own childhood. 

As a result, and to borrow from an episode of The Crown, we don’t do mothers and daughters very well in our family. As an adult, I learned the hard way that the only way out of this loop was to stop it in its tracks. I even opted out of having children of my own, for fear of inadvertently perpetuating a cycle that has no place in loving families. I could not bear the thought of somehow screwing up a child, no matter how hard I would have tried not to. The stakes are too high, and I simply do not have the stomach for that level of risk.

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Our own relationship came to a crashing end when my mother held me responsible for her emotional regulation for the last time. That winter, my beloved grandfather — her father — passed away. Rather than allowing me some reasonable space and time to process my own grief, I was expected to fully manage hers. And her grieving process included coming down on me as hard and as much as humanly possible. 

I felt something break inside of me that February. It was death by a thousand cuts, and I had a real decision to make: my mental health, or Mom’s need for emotional control and domination over other adults, exactly like her mother taught her. Our relationship never had room for the both us, and we never recovered from this final event. I was suddenly too exhausted, too burnt out, too over it to continue to set myself on fire to keep her warm.

To her credit, my mother had the foresight and the instincts to protect my sister and me from her own mother. I am grateful every day that Irene did not have a direct hand in my upbringing, as I am all too familiar with the results of her work. I have very few early memories of my grandmother because we had spent most of my childhood in an estrangement my parents demanded. But my mother never healed enough to protect us from her mother’s destructive legacy of lovelessness, and too many cycles had been perpetuated to sweep under the rug. As it turns out, a toxic family member does not have to be present and directly involved in family life in order to continue forging their destruction. In this way, intergenerational family trauma is the unfortunate gift that keeps on giving. 

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Mother’s and Father’s Day mania need to catch up with the science, or to at least acknowledge its existence. Studies are beginning to look at familial estrangement and the reasons for it. In a 2023 study of parent-adult child estrangement in the United States, 6% of participants were estranged from their mothers while 26% of respondents reported estrangement from their fathers. Another study, published in the book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, reported that 27% of respondents above the age of 18 were actively estranged from a relative. 

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As a children’s book author, I take the reality of toxic family dynamics seriously. We now know that such families are a feature — not a bug — of life for a lot of young people. When I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I had always felt a little bit off when I read books featuring families where nothing all that bad ever seemed to happen and parents got along swimmingly with their children (and each other). It seemed like fantasy to me. If this is real life, I would think to myself, what’s wrong with my family? What’s wrong with me? 

In the middle-grade books that I write, you won’t find the moms (or dads) starring in Leave It to Beaver or The Brady Bunch any time soon. In Jawbreaker, my debut novel, the main character’s mom could not be less emotionally available when her daughter (Max) clearly needs her, even going so far as to strike Max across the face in anger. In my follow-up book, Slouch, the mom seems to want her daughter (Stevie) to be anyone other than who she actually is: a precocious 12-year-old who couldn’t be less interested in playing sports. And in my upcoming novel, Breakout, the mom blames her 13-year-old daughter (Ellis) for Ellis’s worsening complexion, as though children going through puberty have control over such things. In all of my stories, the parents feel perfectly justified in their toxicity, and the young characters have to seek support elsewhere. For too many children, such dynamics are daily life. 

It’s true that many mothers unconditionally love their children and behave in ways consistent with that love. It’s also true that mothers are not perfect and occasionally make mistakes. But it’s also true that many mothers are simply not able to love their children, and their children eventually become adults who wind up in therapy trying to sort it all out (ask me how I know). What does Mother’s Day make of such an array of realities, beyond inducing large-scale guilt and shame for those of us who cannot identify with the Loving Mother aesthetic? 

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Even Anna Jarvis eventually railed against what the holiday ultimately became. According to the Washington Post, Jarvis described Mother’s Day as “a cheap marketing gimmick to profit off an idea that she considered to be hers, and hers alone.” But might she also have been railing against the myth that there is only one kind of mother, and that not all mothers love the people they created? 

This year, as with every year, there is bound to be a plethora of high-traffic outlets pushing out more lists of more quotes and myths about the endless perfection that is mothers and motherhood (seriously, does anyone actually read this drivel?). If these lists must exist, I hope they’ll include other kinds of sentiments, as with those expressed by author Anne Lamott. Each year, on Mother’s Day, she notes that she did not raise her son to celebrate the holiday and republishes the same post. My favorite piece is as follows:  

“Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.”

Christina Wyman is a USA Today bestselling author and teacher living in Michigan. Her highly anticipated middle-grade novel, Slouch, is about a tall girl navigating friends, family, self-esteem, boundaries, and the terrifying knowledge that her body no longer seems to belong to her. Wyman’s books are available wherever books are sold, including through local independent bookstores. Her debut novel, Jawbreaker, a middle-grade book that follows a seventh-grader with a craniofacial anomaly, is a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2023. 

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