It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday.
You probably already know this due to the plethora of mailers and store displays encouraging you to show your mother how much you love her by shelling out some money and buying her a gift or two.
This is will be my second Mother’s Day since having a baby. I feel like I should be able to remember the first one but that whole first six months of parenthood is something of a blur of vomit, tears, and self doubt that not even the best greeting card in the world could’ve cut through. I’m sure the Silver Fox got me a lovely card and a thoughtful gift but I honestly have no idea.
I recently sat down with a pile of these mailers in the hopes of narrowing down the options for the SF, maybe circling a couple of things that I considered appropriate gifts.
Boy, was that a waste of time.
It turns out, I do not have very maternal tastes. Apparently mums are really keen on teacups? And slippers? And things with floral prints? And kitchen appliances? And chocolates shaped like shoes?
Look, I don’t know. I’m still relatively new to all this. There’s an above average chance that I’m just not very good at being “motherly”, whatever that means.
I guess I have some sympathy for the people who run Mother’s Day campaigns. Your target market being “the children and partners of women between the ages of 18 and 80”. That is a rather broad section of society. I guess it’s hard to provide a range of affordable options that will actually appeal to that many people.
Still, do mothers really want new vacuum cleaners and Cath Kidston stationery? Because if the SF turns up on Sunday with a shiny new hoover it might not be the living room rug that gets an aggressive going over.
Slippers seem to be a very popular option too. And I guess it’s hard to argue against them. Who doesn’t want to have snuggly warm feet of a winter time? But some of them are rather unnecessarily twee if not outright ugly. Luckily I have recently acquired an excellent pair so there’s little chance I’ll be subjected to something hideous.
So I find myself feeling like a bit of a fusspot. Just what do you get the non-mumsy mummy? Well, I’d settle for never ever having to see a Kate Upton Game of War advertisement ever again, but I suspect that is asking a bit too much and that I may have to settle, possibly for something chocolate but hopefully not shoe-shaped.
Is your mum hard to buy for? Do you end up getting her “easy” gifts like slippers? Does she pretend to like them anyway?
Originally published on Stuff, 05/05/2015
(Featured image, Dutch 17th century Kitchen interior with an old woman, public domain image via Wikipedia)