Why I’m Skipping Mother’s Day

Should people feel compelled to celebrate a holiday that is painful for so many?

The best Mother’s Day gift I ever received was not from my children. In May 2020, at the height of the pandemic, an anonymous plain brown package arrived in the mail with a note that said: “We see you.”

A jeweler, a former single mother herself, had made 1,000 small heart charms, strung them on bright-orange cords, and asked people to nominate single mothers to receive them. Then she mailed the necklaces out, free of charge. There was something powerful in imagining 1,000 single mothers out in the world with these bright-orange strings and hearts around our necks. The following year, I nominated another friend who needed it. There was nothing performative about it—if we tucked the necklace under a shirt, no one would even notice. Instead, the necklace functioned like a reminder string tied around my finger: I’m not alone; I am one of many, doing this work every day.

I needed that reminder more than my nominator could know.

A few weeks ago, I sat drinking coffee with a fellow mother. We were talking about blended families, about raising sons, about scheduling and carpools. We looked at the calendar and I noted we were closing in on May.

“Can I confess something?” I asked. “I really hate Mother’s Day.”

“Oh, same,” she said. “It is my least favorite day of the year.” We talked for a while about our years as single mothers. Without a partner to orchestrate the reminders of the upcoming day, organizing children’s gifts and crafts, planning out any cake-baking or brunch-going, responsibility for all of the celebrations fell to us. Her honesty was a surprise and a relief; it was comforting to find someone else who was open to admitting that she tolerated the day for the sake of her children, and who looked at that second Sunday in May on the calendar with dread.

I shared with her that the day also spins my children out; I’ve consistently had the worst days of my mothering life on that holiday. She’d had a similar experience and we’d both attributed the tantrums to the day being a giant reminder to the kids that we are divorced. “I wish we could just skip the day,” she said.

I loved this idea. What if anyone who wanted to sit the day out could skip it?

This year, my mother suggested we do just that. We typically go on some family outing, to a zoo or a garden, and have a meal. But we’ve seen a lot of each other lately, and she wanted to spend the day relaxing. At first, I was hurt. Until I realized that this meant I could skip it too.

Why are so many of us still performing a holiday that fills us with so much ambivalence? Profit seems like one obvious answer. In 2023, Americans are expected to spend $35.7 billion on flowers, cards, and other gifts to celebrate moms, according to the National Retail Federation. That is more than the GDP of Iceland. Until my mother released me this year, I felt obligated to participate. “Mothers have always existed but ‘motherhood’ is a comparatively recent invention,” wrote Ann Dally in Inventing Motherhood: The Consequence of an Ideal. It turns out that the holiday has generated conflict for more than a century.

President Woodrow Wilson established Mother’s Day as a national holiday on May 9, 1914. The holiday had originated a few years earlier, in West Virginia, where it was created by a woman named Anna Jarvis.  

Jarvis’s mother had died in 1905. On the second anniversary of her death, Jarvis honored her memory by distributing 500 white carnations at their church. She chose white carnations because they were her mother’s favorite flower. After this first memorial in 1907, it became her dream to turn the day into an international celebration of all mothers. She often told people, “I created Mother’s Day not because I loved my mother, but because she loved me.”

As a graduate student at West Virginia University in 2004, the historian Katharine Lane Antolini was offered a tour of the International Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia, the site of the first official Mother’s Day celebration, in 1908. After visiting the church, Antolini walked through the basement and noticed boxes of documents on the kitchen’s floor. Concerned for the integrity of the papers, which she felt were vulnerable to flooding and mold, Antolini asked the trustees if she could archive the material. She found that the majority of the letters belonged to Anna Jarvis, who’d campaigned intensely for Wilson to sign the day into the national register. Antolini used the archival material to write Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle to Control Mother’s Day.

Jarvis was an unlikely founder. She never married and was not a mother herself. “The problem is, she didn’t understand motherhood from the perspective of a mother,” Antolini told me. “It is hard for a single woman with no children to design a holiday asking households to celebrate mothers. Hers is a very sentimental, traditional, domestic view, whereas her mother would’ve done something much bigger.”

Although Jarvis believed she was creating a holiday to honor mothers, she made the holiday personal, a memorial designed by a daughter swamped with grief. Wilson supported the holiday because, in a time of turbulent change as women fought for more independence and expanded rights as citizens, it was aimed squarely at celebrating the women who stayed home and tended their brood.

We are constantly reinventing what it means to be a mother in this country, constantly revising what it means to honor one. I love being a mother. But I didn’t always. I assumed everyone else just knew what to do. For a long time, I thought I was a failure as a mother. I thought that something hadn’t turned on, that some switch hadn’t been flipped.

Only years later, when I was on my own with these two strange creatures, did I begin to understand that my failure was not in mothering. My failure was in trying to do it alone. Once I started sharing my fears with other mothers, I was surprised by the care and camaraderie they shared back with me. I think of my friend in the coffee shop, the relief after just a few moments of conversation with someone who understood. We could have stayed sealed up, performing perfect motherhood, but instead we shared with each other, mother to mother.

I am no longer a single mother, but I still wear my necklace with the bright-orange string when I need to channel the power of mothers. I love my sons, and I love their handprint Mother’s Day cards from when they were toddlers, but the support from other mothers and from my own mother at that time is what sustained me, what made me feel like a mother in the first place.