I've been a single working mother for 15 years, on call 24x7 day-in and day-out, public holidays and weekends included as part of the deal, and still find it an insult that on one day of the year all my hard work and sacrifice is acknowledged. Well, not an entire day, just through breakfast or, if Mum is lucky, through lunch but then it's back to Business as Usual.
When Scout was a littley, she really struggled to understand why I loathed Mother's Day. Everyone at Kindy was excited about it and all her friends were excited about it ... and then there was her mother, the only person in her universe who wasn't into Mother's Day.
There were a couple of years when Young Scout would make me go back to bed so she could fix me breakfast in bed. And I'd get to clean up the mess when she'd dump the tray in my bed and dissolve into tears. So, I'd go into full-on Mom Mode: calm her down, reassure her that everything was OK, clean her up, clean the carpet in my room, launder my sheets, clean up the kitchen all the time convincing her that it was the BEST Mother's Day breakfast in bed ever and how lucky was I to have such a wonderful daughter!
That's why we started running in the Mother's Day Classic at the Domain. Though she was convinced that it was to raise money for breast cancer and to show our support for friends, like Kathryn Sheehan, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. But even the 6.30am start was better than Mother's Day breakfast in bed!
But over the years, Scout has come to understand that my dislike of Mother's Day was because, if the work I did as a mother was so important, my being a mother should be celebrated every day and not just one morning a year. She now has taken to admonishing her friends to celebrate their Mums every day of the year, not just on Mother's Day.
Maybe Mother's Day isn't so bad after all.
