I hate Mother's Day. Not because my Babbage-esque steam-powered computer of a heart doesn't even have enough room to squeeze in a love for me dear old Mum, you understand. I just can't understand the point.
I know plenty of you are fizzing in your seats right now, desperate to blow the layer of crisp bits off your keyboard to tell me "There is no point because it was all invented by card makers to increase sales just like Valentine's Day, and they even killed Kennedy just so they could sell 'Sorry to hear your president's brains got splattered across the limo upholstery ' FAAAAAAAAACT!". I don't care about that. Partially because I'm suspicious enough to assume that every attempt at enforced merriment or gratitude probably began with an equally enterprising attempt to cash in ('See these shiny pebbles? If you don't exchange them for your goat the Mighty Fartelbrau will EAT YOUR FACE!'), but mainly because if I found out tomorrow that birthdays were made in a Hallmark lab yesterday along with the technology to re-write our brains into thinking we spent our childhood being given bikes and computer games once a year (along with nineteenth-Century books, because my uncle never really understood the concept of "kid"), I'd still be demanding my tribute come next January.
See, I get birthdays. You give someone a present, they give one back later on. That's reaffirming your position as equals. Christmas works in roughly the same way, everyone gives to everyone else. It's a great equaliser, like LSD or genital crabs; a ritualistic alternative to grabbing someone in the pub and telling them "You're my besht mate!".
Mother's Day isn't like that. You can't pay back your mother, you can't attempt to balance the scales. She carried you around for nine months, the last couple for which she might as well have had a live pig installed inside her for all the fun it was, before finally firing you out in a process so disgusting I am still ashamed to have taken part in it. Then it's endless devotion to our tiny brains and grasping talons, right up to the point we become teenagers, after which it gets worse.
You can't make that up. You may as well try to send a gift basket to oxygen. On top of which, I'm unclear on the need to give people cards that reaffirm a basic biological imperative. If Mother's Day is something we need, how about we make the Sunday after I'm Pretty Sure I Want To Fuck You Day, if we're going to make rituals out of our DNA hard-wiring.
Just don't put the Fuck Day cards next to the Mother's Day ones, alright? That could lead to court cases, and certainly a seven thousand percent increase of projectile vomiting in Clintons.
Put them next to the kid's birthday ones, instead. That way gift shopping stops being a chore, and starts being a desperate attempt to avoid seeming like a paedo. It would also allow Hallmark to release a "Sorry to hear you were wrongfully convicted of pederasty", and that at least is a card you know is going to be appreciated by its chosen audience.
