The Day After Mother’s Day
Anna Jarvis
This woman invented Mother’s Day. Then she had second thoughts. She saw how the day had turned into commercialized bullshit with greeting card and floral companies making a fortune while the rest of us putzes go along with the buying spree.
She sued the companies profiting from the day.
Without success.
In 1943, she began organizing a petition to rescind Mother’s Day.[23] However, these efforts were halted when she was placed in the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania.[24] People connected with the floral and greeting card industries paid the bills to keep her in the sanitarium.[23]
Wikipedia
The greeting card moguls felt bad for the poor thing. Or maybe they wanted to keep the lid on. Whatever. Like everything in American History, you do a little digging and a pile of steaming hot bullshit invariably erupts…
The day after Mother’s Day
I’m sitting at my favorite big table here at the office.
Same shit different day…
“Of course every day is unique, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is,” the smelly Irish dude says.
Today for some reason Smelly bares a striking resemblance to the poet Robert Burns. An old version. I don’t have an old version to show you because Robert Burns croaked at 37. I’m imagining an old Robert Burns. Scraggly but with the same nose and penetrating eyes. In any case, this painting will have to do.
The Loud Talker is sharing the other big table with Smelly (who, like Burns, is actually Scottish). She got here a few minutes after I arrived and I’m thinking it’s too much effort to move. Maybe she’ll sit quietly.
No luck.
“I HAD A WONDERFUL MOTHER’S DAY,” she screams.
Smelly smiles.
“DO YOU HAVE A MOTHER?”
“I certainly do, dear,” Smelly says. “All God’s Children have Mothers.”
“THAT’S WONDERFUL! ISN’T IT WONDERFUL?” She’s sitting with her coffee. I don’t see her cell phone anywhere. I’m wondering if she took it to the phone shop. I’m thinking of asking her.
I’m not asking. Asking would encourage her.
“I READ THAT MOTHER’S DAY WAS INVENTED RIGHT HERE IN AMERICA. IT JUST GOES TO SHOW HOW WONDERFUL AMERICAN’S ARE. AMERICAN’S ARE SO WONDERFUL. IT’S WONDERFUL. IT’S WONDERFUL DON’T YOU THINK?” She’s staring at the Lobotomy Dude.
The Lobotomy dude occupies the chair facing their big table. I’m trying to shrink into my lap top. She hasn’t noticed me yet. Maybe she has. Maybe she caught my bad vibe from the other day and now finds it advantageous to avoid me.
No luck. She turns from Lobotomy and fixes me with her bigness.
DO YOU HAVE A MOTHER?”
“What?”
“DO YOU HAVE A MOTHER!”
“Of course I have a mother. Everybody has a mother.”
“ISN’T MOTHER’S DAY WONDERFUL? FATHER’S DAY IS OKAY. I MEAN IT’S OKAY. BUT IT’S NOT SPECIAL LIKE MOTHER’S DAY. MOTHER’S DAY IS SO MUCH MORE SPECIAL. I DON’T KNOW WHY, EXACTLY. I JUST FEEL IT MEANS SO MUCH MORE. AFTER ALL, WE MOTHERS. WE ARE THE ONES WHO BRING LIFE INTO THE WORLD. FATHERS ARE IMPORTANT. DON’T GET ME WRONG. I HAD A WONDERFUL FATHER. HE WAS ALWAYS SO WONDERFUL TO ME. BUT MOTHERS ARE JUST…SO MUCH MORE WONDERFUL!!!!!”
She’s staring at me.
“DON’T YOU AGREE? DON’T YOU THINK…”
“I killed my Mother,” The Lobotomy dude says.
Her head snaps away from me, thank god.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” She says, glaring at Lobotomy.
Horror and shock replaces her goofiness.
Smelly appears bemused.
“I killed my mother,” Lobotomy says. “One day she unlocked my door and opened it. Normally she would slide my food through a slot at the bottom of the door. This day was different. She unbolted the door. Released the chains. Turned off the alarm. Appeared before me with a tray of Kibble. The Kibble piled high and mixed with a brown sauce meant to add flavor to the imitation Chop Suey. Perhaps she feared the tray would not fit through the slot. I am speculating. I watched as she entered the room and placed the tray on the block of wood where I would routinely bang my head in despair. I watched her for a moment. Standing before me, she seemed contrite. I smiled. And then, motioning to her, as if I meant to give her a motherly hug, I took her abnormally long neck in my hands and squeezed, and squeezed, until her face contorted into a purple mask of death. Afterwards, I went for a walk along the bank of our neighborhood river. Often, after my surgery, Images of the river would come to me…like a tranquil vision.”
The Loud Talker stares at Lobotomy.
Abruptly she snaps to attention and rushes off.
“She left her cream and sugar,” I comment.
Smelly is chuckling.
The Lobotomy dude rises out of his chair and moves after the Loud Talker. She catches him approaching her and bolts out the door.
“That goofy fella is full of shit,” Smelly says.
“You think?”
“He was in here the other day. Him and his Mother. She’s a lovely lady she is. Watches after him.”
Smelly continues chuckling…
The card
He just keeps chuckling.
I kind of find the whole deal amusing too.
But it aint that funny.
Smelly’s getting a kick out of it. He keeps chuckling.
As he chuckles I notice the card Loud Talker left behind.
Laying there beside her coffee cup.
I’m staring at the card.
I open the card.
“We love you sooooo much, mommy!”
Signed,
“Becky, Bobby, Alison, Annie, Patty Nose, and baby Face Freddy.”
Shit.
Now I gotta find her.
Maybe I’ll leave the card at the front counter.
2 thoughts on “The Day After Mother’s Day”
“Mom,” Wylie begins the chapter “Common Women,” “is an American creation. Her elaboration was necessary because she was launched as Cinderella.” Here Wylie refers to an earlier chapter in which he explained how American women were inculcated in a distorted version of the fairy tale that conditioned them to expect material wealth, not because of virtuous activities but merely because they were female. “The idea women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift — an idea promulgated by every medium and many an advertisement — has defeated half the husbands in America,” Wylie wrote. “It has made at least half our homes into centers of disillusionment. […] It long ago became associated with the notion that the bearing of children was such an unnatural and hideous ordeal that the mere act entitled women to respite from all other physical and social responsibility.” He went on:
Past generations of men have accorded to their mothers, as a rule, only such honors as they earned by meritorious action in their individual daily lives. Filial duty was recognized by many sorts of civilizations and loyalty to it has been highly regarded among most peoples. But I cannot think, offhand, of any civilization except ours in which an entire division of living men has been used, during wartime, or at any time, to spell out the word “mom” on a drill field, or to perform any equivalent act.
This was an example of the sort of “Megaloid” mom worship that Wylie dubbed “Momism.”
Wylie devotes most of “Common Women” to savaging every aspect of contemporary motherhood. “Mom is a jerk,” as he put it. Wylie’s moms were middle-aged and menopausal Cinderellas, hirsute and devoid of sex appeal. “She smokes thirty cigarettes a day,” Wylie wrote,
chews gum, and consumes tons of bonbons and petits fours. She drinks moderately, which is to say, two or three cocktails before dinner every night and a brandy and a couple of highballs afterward. She doesn’t count the two cocktails she takes before lunch when she lunches out, which is every day she can. On Saturday nights, at the club or in the juke joint, she loses count of her drinks and is liable to get a little tiddly, which is to say, shot or blind.
Vacuous creatures, these women occupy themselves with radio soap operas and movie fan magazines and play bridge “with the voracity of a hammerhead shark.”
The indictment continues, and continues, and continues:
Mom is organization-minded. Organizations, she has happily discovered, are intimidating to all men, not just to mere men. They frighten politicians to sniveling servility and they terrify pastors; they bother bank presidents and they pulverize school boards. Mom has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires.
Knowing nothing about medicine, art, science, religion, law, sanitation, civics, hygiene, psychology, morals, history, geography, poetry, literature, or any other topic except the allconsuming [sic] one of momism, she seldom has any especial interest in what, exactly, she is doing as a member of any of these endless organizations, so long as it is something.
She reads the fiction in three women’s magazines each month and occasionally skims through an article, which usually angers her so that she gets other moms to skim through it, and then they have a session on the subject over a canister of spiked coffee in order to damn the magazine, the editors, the author, and the silly girls who run about these days.
During World War II, Wylie went to work for the Office of Facts and Figures (later known as The Office of War Information) in Washington, DC, but resigned when his superiors rejected his plan to tell Americans about the Bataan Death March and other atrocities committed by the Japanese, in an effort to stir their patriotic commitment to the war effort. Dispirited by this experience, Wylie returned home to Miami Beach, where, from May 12 to July 4, 1942, he hammered out a series of splenetic essays that comprised “a catalogue of what I felt to be wrong morally, spiritually and intellectually with my fellow citizens.” These essays would eventually be gathered into Generation of Vipers, whose 18 chapters skewered a range of supposedly sacrosanct American beliefs, groups, and institutions, such as organized religion, business, Congress, doctors, and the supposed goodness of the common man. But the chapter that ignited a firestorm of controversy and rocketed the book to bestsellerdom was “Common Women,” Wylie’s caustic attack on Americans’ sanctification of motherhood, a cultural syndrome Wylie dubbed “Momism.” This was tantamount to spitting on the flag.
Peter Winkler
Philip Wylie reminds me of you, Stewart!