¡A la madre!

a mother's day reflection

On Friday, I went to get my nails done (and a pedicure!). It’s a very bougie pleasure, one of those things that I wouldn’t dream of spending hundreds on in the US, but that is very reasonably-priced where I live in Mexico.

I chose Friday specifically because 1) a pedicure at that point was an increasingly urgent emergency, and 2) they were having a special Mother’s Day event. Mimosas and snacks were promised! They were delivered, though I had to ask for them which was a little awkward.

Anyway. They have a TV there, and the owner declared it would be a day of movies about mothers! “Okay, so which one?” Everyone drew a blank.

You won’t find many movies about mothers, I thought cynically, unless it’s about how awful one is.

Mothers are forever nagging, usually annoying background characters who don’t want the hero to have any fun.

In the end they did actually find one called Mother’s Day (I stand corrected!) with the ageless Jennifer Anniston and Kate Hudson. Like most dramadies, the characters were all magically rich, flawless, and thin with perfect hair. I guess the makers of those kinds of movies just want people to enjoy looking at beauty? I find it extremely weird, but then, movies aren’t usually a reflection of real life anyway.

That said, there have been some pretty notable mom characters.

Sally Field as Julia Roberts’ mother in Steel Magnolias is good one, and a realistic one. The film does a great job at showing the “behind the nagging/fretting” portrait: she’s a realist to the others’ optimism. She doesn’t want her daughter to get pregnant, not because she doesn’t want anyone to have fun or grand-babies, but because she knows it would cause horrible health problems. Sadly, she is vindicated — her daughter dies.

Other favorites are more comical. Catherine O’Hara in the original Beetlejuice is someone who, with age, I suddenly identify with. I spend a lot of time making my house “artistic,” while my kid would be perfectly happy to paint her room black. She basically is teen Wynona Ryder, and at times we are equally perplexed by one another. (Luckily, we have a lot of close and fun moments too.)

Then there’s Emma Thomson’s Karen in Love Actually, which will always be one of my favorite movies regardless of how “problematic” it reveals itself to be through a more modern lens. This is another character I’ve paid more attention to with time, as my life begins to resembles hers more than the adorable Natalie’s. I love the line where she says, “My horrid son — Bernard — stays in his room all the time. Thank goodness!”

Honestly, that line is revolutionary: a mother daring to say her son isn’t the greatest thing in the world! I both was and continue to be fascinated by it, because the expectation of motherhood is so far in the opposite direction that it just slaps my head right around every time.

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In other mother-adjacent news, the head of the SEP (Secretaria de Educación Pública) in Mexico on Thursday announced that the school year would end, not on July 15th as planned, but on June 5th, nearly a month and a half early.

The reason? In part, the World Cup. Also, “extraordinary heat” — I guess Mario Delgado has the DL on the weather two months from now, too. He said in his announcement that it was a result of “many petitions.”

By whom? He didn’t say, but I suspect it was his kids.

This, let it be said, is illegal; children in Mexico are required to have 180 days of instruction each school year, and this will put them at around 160. President Sheinbaum seemed to be caught just as much by surprise as everyone else. In her mañanera on Friday, she tried to calm the masses by saying that the decision “was not final.”

SEP cancelling school is a problem that will of course mostly fall on mothers, who are assumed to want to drop all other activities to care for children because what else would they do? Among mothers, aunts, and grandmas, the Mexican SEP director seems to assume that we’ll simply “figure it out.”

This is a trap. Because if you admit you don’t want to spend all of your time with your children (nor they with you, but that’s beside the point) or that you have other important things to be doing during the day than supervising their summer vacation, then you reveal yourself to be the worst thing ever: a bad mother. But even that judgement does not absolve you of any responsibilities; you just get the work and judged for not having the right feelings about it.

And of course you will figure it out, because mothers will ultimately do what they need to do to make sure their kids are okay, even at the cost of themselves not being okay; it’s practically programmed into us.

Some, let it be said, truly do do this with joy — it feels like their higher calling. It was for my mom. But good ol’ capitalism gets in the way, of course, that fact an “unsolvable impediment” to conservatives’ most enduring wet dream of having the women stay home (without paying them) to care for children and cook and clean for everyone.

My mom, doing the mom work with me on one boob and my sister on the other.

But it really does “take a village” to raise a child, and school is an important part of that village. They socialize with their peers, and they get to be themselves away from their parents. It also means they’re in a safe place while their caretakers can get their own jobs done, happily or otherwise, so that the kids have got a nice warm bed and food on the table when they get home.

Will the SEP backtrack on this “early vacation”? For everyone’s sake — children and mothers — I hope so. Kids have fulfilling non-parent things to do, and parents have (hopefully fulfilling at least of the time) non-kid things to do.

For moms, when their kids are at school is usually it in terms of their non-caretaking time. (I’m in the unique position of getting extra — my kid is with her dad and step-mom half of the week.)

I recall another line from Emma Thomson in Love Actually when speaking with her brother (Hugh Grant), the Prime Minister: “What did my brother do today? He fought for his country. What did I do? I made a papier-mache lobster head.”

So come on, Delgado. Let’s give the moms a little more time. Maybe they want to feel like they’re contributing in other big ways, too.