Alright, I think after not doing it the past two years, I’ll throw in yet another anti-Mother’s Day spiel. Why not?
Although, in a weird change of pace, I’m not so much attacking mothers this time but more the stereotypes and lofty expectations, the vision of what an ideal mother is supposed to be.
I heard a quote the other day (for those of you here in the DC-area, it was 97.1 WASH’s “thought of the day” they do every morning) which was something like “when there are four pieces of pie left for five people, it’s the mother who says ‘I never cared too much for pie anyway.'”
Another example. On a Simpsons episode from last year or so, at the beginning, the family is making these shoeboxes so they could watch the upcoming solar eclipse. They each have their own, but Homer is a dumbass and breaks his and thus can’t watch the eclipse. What does Marge do? Practically without thinking about it or even being asked, she hands hers over to him, and now she has to be left out of watching the solar eclipse (only to end up looking up anyway and getting blinded).
In both scenarios, WTF? People act like “oh, mothers are so wonderful, they never think of themselves!” Uh, not quite. More like they are expected to never think of (or for) themselves! Had Marge not given Homer her shoebox and told him “you broke yours, your loss, go to hell”, then she would have looked like a bitch. Had the mother taken one of those four pie pieces and someone else had to go without, she would have looked greedy.
Continue reading “Self-Sacrificing Saints”
