A Mother's Day post-mortem

So that's it for another year then. Mother's Day 2014 has been and gone. If you're lucky, the memory of being made to feel like a queen for the day will sustain you until next year.  Or then again, maybe not...

 

Here at Average Towers Mother's Day 2014 was a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly.

 

The good consisted of the heavily hinted about breakfast in bed, some lovely home-made cards and some extremely thoughtful small gifts, which I suspect (well, I know) that hubby was responsible for.  Lunch was a failsafe M & S meal deal (I believe our local store was packed with bewildered looking men on Saturday morning) and I enjoyed the unusual but pleasant sensation of sitting throughout the entire meal while others fetched and carried.

 

So far we'd stuck to the script.

 

 

Then came the bad in the form of a point blank refusal from my daughter to come for a walk with me, which she'd hitherto happily agreed to.  The reason for her volte-face? Her brother was coming too. 

 

This was swiftly followed by the ugly - in the form of my reaction.  Why oh why, for just one day, couldn't they be nice to one another - if only for my sake? That was just the start of my rant - once I got going I trotted out every 'angry mother' cliché in the book.  I followed up my tirade with an extremely mature sulk.

 

If you're thinking that this was something of an overreaction to a minor everyday blip, you'd be absolutely right.  I may not be Mother of the Year but I like to think that I'd have normally handled the situation far more equably.  Instead, I made the whole thing worse and spoiled part of the day for us all.

 

So, what's my excuse then? While there's no justification for the way I reacted, some subsequent soul-searching led me down a fairly obvious path...

 

Unrealistic expectations.  I'd stupidly fallen for all the hype that surrounds this type of celebration (I think we all know which event in the calendar year is the worst for this).  The imagery and media messages that I'd been exposed to in the lead up to Mother's Day made me think that I was entitled to the perfect day, with nothing whatsoever to ruffle my maternal feathers. I'm not materialistic about Mother's Day - not in the slightest - but I had been greedy in terms of what I wanted from my children.   Because, as every parent out there knows, perfect behaviour for an entire day just doesn't happen with little ones. Stupid, stupid me.

 

In case you're wondering, once I'd come to my senses, the rest of Mothering Sunday was a hoot.  My personal highlight was our family game of football, played in the back garden with limited skills but huge smiles.   My day may not have been perfect, but there were some truly perfect moments.  And those left me feeling like the luckiest mother and wife in the world.

 

As for Mother's Day 2015 - average behaviour is just fine. Sprinkles of perfection? They're a bonus.

 

How was Mother's Day 2014 for you? Leave a comment and let me know.

 

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