I used to dread the Christmas season, with its endless drawn-out repetitive advertising and TV “specials” and just relentlessness.
Now, with the advent of Facebook, it’s Mother’s Day I dread. The period covered is shorter, but the nausea factor is 10x deeper. Besides the photos of someone’s mother from 30 years ago carrying the poster as a baby/child/college grad, there is the endlessly copied glurge about keeping candles burning and definitions of “mother” and a million other things. It’s still going on. I think I’m gonna puke.
I loved my mother, in a suitably moderate way. I don’t miss her every day nor think of her every minute (or is it the other way around?). I don’t think my life ended when hers did, or that she is watching over me from heaven.
Some of us have mothers who ARE on Facebook. We like to let her know we love her. You got a problem with that? Maybe Facebook just isn’t for you. Or maybe you need to unfriend some people who have more emotions than you are comfortable observing.
My Mother died when I was a child. So I get that it’s just too much. Makes me sick. I insist my kids don’t go crazy. A card is enough and then I am sickened by the sentimental crap in them. I wish I didn’t have these days. This past year my DIL decided her kids should celebrate grandparents day with me. Oh. Yay. Just what I needed.
Like with so much these days it becomes an opportunity for one-upmanship. Someone wants to show they have the capacity to love the most, to grieve the most, to emote the most.
My feelings for my family are between me and them and I don’t feel the need to put them on public display or try and out-do others. I have a daughter (12) who makes a point of giving me a kiss and hug every night and tells me she loves me, my son (10) would never dream of doing so except at gun-point but when I say night-night to him and give him a cuddle you can tell he really likes it and squeezes back. Both responses are equally valuable to me and they know it, it isn’t a competition.
On the other hand I do get the value of remembering to express your feelings to your loved ones, and if it’s not scheduled, it’s probably not gonna happen. So this is the scheduled day, let’s get it over with.
I can tell you I will not be marking the occasion by buying Mom a frigging diamond necklace!
My whatsapp exploded with two of my relatives sending the same pieces of motherly glurge to every list they’re a part of. Matricide and SiLicide are still illegal, right?
I agree with the OP - I think it’s the “no raindrop thinks it’s responsible for the flood” phenomenon. Each poster on FB is individually glurg-ing, but when dozens or hundreds do so on the FB feed, it’s a glurge-flood. Furthermore, those who don’t glurge will feel peer-pressured to glurge.
My wife mentioned a couple years ago that Mother’s Day can be horrible to the women who aren’t mothers any more or have trouble becoming one. Or what about kids who lost a mom?
Let’s have more commercials, advertisements, and school activities about it!!!
My mother was/is a bitch. Completely useless as a mother and as a human being. Oh right she gave birth to me, whatever. Also I have never been a mother.
However, I think love is a wonderful thing. I would much rather see messages of love than hate.
I also do not think every ad or card is personally directed toward me.
Too many people seem to look for opportunities to be offended.
You love your mother? Tell her in whatever way pleases the two of you and everyone else can just go scratch.
And to people with lousy mothers. BTW, the two women who’ve been trying to out-glurge each other in my feeds? My mother (who’s narcissistic to the point of solipsism) and SiL-the-Doc (who wishes she’d been born before there was a Law of Gravity so she would have been able to invent it). Seeing those two send messages about how wonderful mothers are is like seeing Trump giving a speech about the importance of chastity.
I just hate the way retailers use any holiday to go over the top to chisel larger and larger amounts of cash out of me. To my memory, M-Day was pretty much a card-and-a-dinner celebration. I certainly do not consider it a diamond ring day and resent retailers for trying to make it into one.
There’s a difference between offended and annoyed. I think the OP was in the slowly bobbing Annoyed Canoe with me rather than the Offended Schooner plowing its way through all who object.
I can’t identify with any of those sappy things people post. And what makes me want to jump from the Annoyed Canoe to the Irritated Motorboat is the little “share if you love your mother” tag at the end. Buzz off, Skippy. I don’t forward glurge or share dreck.
It’s one of many Facebook annoyances. I get it, you love your mother. I get it, you fucking just adore the fucking shit out of the military. I get it, you’re fucking butt hurt about things that aren’t even true- (as in, kids no longer say the pledge of allegiance for fear of offending someone). We divide the year into various Facebook tributes now- first the mothers, then the troops for memorial day, then the fathers, then the troops for Independence Day, etc.
On Sunday we visited my gf’s mother, bringing with us everything we needed to make a scrumptious dinner. While there, I got a text message from a woman I do not really like. She asked if I was visiting my mom. I replied, “she ded”. Haven’t heard back yet, hopefully I will not.
