UGH, Mother's Day 👎
Thanks for the nine months we shared together, and I’m gonna stop right there.
This week’s Flop Era is dedicated to all of us who will not be staring at the left quadrant of our mother’s forehead in a video chat that took 75 minutes of tech support to accomplish. This is for the babes among us who are like, mother’s day? During corona? Scoop my eyeballs out and serve them in a waffle cone.
This one is for my favorite women who have the kind of relationship with their mothers that’s heavy on the “thanks for the nine months we shared together, and I’m gonna stop right there.”
I know that the Internet is a cesspool of white supremacist misogynists, and that my mother, who breathes fire, would have all of them crying into their AR-15s after she was done amplifying their insecurities into the megaphone she calls her vocal chords. She’s also a cackling witch who boils her enemies in emotional trauma and serves the bone broth to their starving families.
I’m like *thisclose* to having her sit in on a Zoom meeting for work.
Look, my mother taught me a few nuggets, and for this I am eternally grateful. She taught me black underwear is bomb, and men — whether they have one job or three — will always find time to cheat, hold your boobs when going down the steps braless, and your sixtieth birthday is the perfect time to hop on the 30th anniversary of your twenties pogo stick and start drunk texting and loser man marrying for funsies.
My mom is permanently like, "Bitches, we ride from dusk till dawn and dance on the graves of everything that might make life less shitty."
Imagine Stevie Nicks. But make her a Lohan.
When you’re marinating in this kind of embryonic fluid, you have to look outside your comfort zone of feelings tornadoes, and re-build. I built my house with a foundation of messy women who mothered me with their raspy voices, bruised bodies, bleached hair, stories, addictions, bad men, jokes, art, intelligence, scholarship, truth and triumphs.
Fran Lebowitz, Courtney Love, Maya Angelou, Dorothy Allison, Nora Ephron, the sisters Bronte, Janeane Garofalo, Kathy Griffin, Aretha, Joan Rivers, bell hooks, Martha Stewart, Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna, Carrie Fisher.
When you have a motherless void, like I do, you need to fill it with big names. And real friends. And women I haven’t even met yet. Like the one currently walking past my house. Or the friend of a friend I ran into at my kid’s school thing. And her mother. Might as well include her sisters too. I’ll take as many women as you can possibly throw at me. Preferably over fifty. I’m slutty for stand-ins.
I want to be the elderly millennial sweetheart out on the lanai with the Golden Girls. Dorothy, you sarcastic giraffe, mother me from beyond the grave. WE WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER.
For a lot of us Mother’s Day is a crotch hole in our leggings. When the waitress asks, “Is Pepsi okay??” FaceTime freezing with our mouths open and our chins frozen in scream. Everything about Kellyanne Conway. Tit zits. Nipple hair. Turkey bacon. Removing your gels during a pandemic. Losing that last hair tie. When the only size left is medium and XS. But. Her. Emails.
We will get through this insufferable, capitalist, mind-numbing day of nostalgia land mines and burnt toast feelings. We will not do it with grace. There will be eye rolls and muting and unfollows and swear words and not picking up the phone because social media is an estrogen tsunami, and you’re no Patrick Swayze on a surfboard ready to die for one more wild ride.
If no one tells you today: I’m happy you’re here, babe. And with us. You make sweats look sexy and you have the finest taste in books. Your Spotify playlists are *chef’s kiss* I see you thriving despite it all. 💅💅
CURRENTLY READING, WATCHING & LISTENING
Reading:
Wow, No Thank You
Just Added:
That’s Mental: Painfully Funny Things About Being Mentally Ill
Watching:
Jayde Adams: Serious Black Jumper (Amazon Prime)
Random Internet Thing I Liked:
I am this kind of mom (TikTok)
Listening:
The Weeknd // After Hours