Brunch Deconstructed

The Conflicted Ritual Known as Mother’s Day

The brunch fantasy…in Paris, no lines, no dishwasher in sight

Mother’s Day is around the corner and around here, you know what that means? Absolutely nothing. Any enthusiasm I might muster for Mother’s Day will always be tempered by my own Mom’s disdain for the occasion. “Every Day is Mother’s Day,” Nina would say, rolling her eyes at the reference to the sappiest of all “Hallmark holidays.” She said this, I always believed, both to take the spotlight off herself and to relieve us of any expectations.

And so, we kids did little to nothing for Mother’s Day. The one time I did get my mom flowers, they were daffodils stolen from a distant neighbor’s garden, obtained in the Chevy Malibu I’d stolen from our driveway. It seemed a fitting way to honor a mom who encouraged underage driving for the conveniences it afforded us all.

Out of tradition when I had kids of my own I furthered her Mother’s Day ennui, denying myself the questionable pleasures of breakfast in bed (the crumbs!) or, worse, brunch with the masses (the lines! the hollandaise made of the week’s worth of partially used table butter!). Accordingly my kids learned to do nothing on the day, and I was mostly happy with it.

Well, except for that one time…

It was a rainy Mother’s Day when my kids were in middle school. They’d long since sussed out my inherited Mother’s Day apathy, but did not get the strong hints that a modest amount of appreciation, some tiny efforts, were in order. The house was a mess, everyone was inside generating more and more dirty dishes and then, around 11:30 started looking a little expectant about lunch.

Fine, I thought. I’ll make you all a Mother’s Day lunch. I’ll make those Tempeh Rueben sandwiches in Cooking Light I’ve been meaning to try. Now, no matter how horrible those may sound to you, I assure you they were worse. It was likely due to pilot error but they were inedible.

My family saw the writing on the wall and immediately feared for their dinner. Still reeling from the reuben disaster (and the self-generated giant mess), but also somehow indignant, I issued the ultimatum. “I don’t care what we have for dinner, but I’m not making it!” Before they could finish their sentence about taking me out to dinner I finished, “…and I do NOT want to go out and stand in line with the rest of humanity on Mother’s Day.”

I believe we had some excellent man-made burgers that night and it was the last time I made dinner for the kids on Mother’s Day. So that kind of worked.

But it also concerned me. Had the vast Hallmark conspiracy worked? Did I actually care about Mother’s Day? Since her passing, I have had time to reexamine Nina’s whole anti-Mother’s Day stance. I do believe she didn’t want flowers or candy or, God forbid, a brunch reservation. I suspect, however, that her dismissiveness of the whole Mother’s Day construct was more about doubling down on her momness and letting us all off the hook rather than forcing some reverence dictated by the calendar. Maybe, aside from that, she did want a little recognition on this one day of 365.

I Blame Brunch

My sister Beatie assures me that it was no act. Mom really hated Mother’s Day and passed that feeling along to her. “I proudly carry on the tradition,” she maintains. Some of the antipathy is directly related to brunch itself. “I want both meals,” Beatie explains. “Brunch cheats me out of one of them.” It really comes down to brunch for me as well; not even brunch itself but the forced nature it assumes on Mothers’ Day. I fully appreciate brunch in its unforced form, which is a bunch of people, possibly hung over, gathering lazily in the midst of ample and excellent food and coffee, to discuss recently past or upcoming events and simply hanging out contentedly in each other’s company.

The contrived, Mother’s Day version of brunch—whereby overdressed and under enthusiastic families, in the name of fulfilling some bogus expectations of family harmony wait in line for a crowded table with mediocre food—that version makes me want to hunker down barefoot on the lawn with a foil-wrapped mini mart breakfast sandwich and call it good.

What do we really want? So little!

Flowers or chocolate are certainly a nice gesture but what’s even better is taking a little time to acknowledge moms by doing some of the un-fun daily tasks. These are things like cleaning up after oneself, unloading the dishwasher, changing out the empty toilet paper roll, moving the damn shoes out of the way. The bar is low, people. A friend asks her son to take on one task with her (this year it is cleaning his closet) and her husband takes on her to-do list instead of his. Both are genius!

For anyone reading who might still be unsure of what to do, I’m going to make this really easy for you. An ideal Mother’s Day gift acknowledges what we don’t want to do (see unloading dishwasher, above). What we really want is the absence of planning or cooking or cleaning or really thinking. Just for a day, or part of a day, or a night. No decisions other than, perhaps, which beer am I going to have for dinner? Not with dinner. For dinner. And what music and I going to crank so I can dance around the kitchen with that beer in my hand and not get mocked?

The point here is that the little things matter. Just a little acknowledgement goes a long way. It’s really all any mother wants. When faced with the void, that may get construed as wanting gifts or special meals. Back to brunch and tempeh reubens. It’s not about the food. It’s never about the food. It’s about getting people together and getting along. Any day that miracle happens in your own household, then Nina was right, and every day IS Mother’s Day.