Mother's Day in the USA

My column this week is about mothers.

I am in Atlanta, Georgia, as I write this article and we have Mother’s Day happening upon the nation. I already had a Mother’s Day back in March in the UK, so I am being greedy expecting two celebrations.

To be honest, I don’t really buy into Mother’s Day; I feel it’s a commercial vehicle to sell merchandise without real emotion and honesty. I don’t need my daughter to buy me a candy heart-shaped cookie to let me know she loves me. My daughter Ashley is here on tour with me in Atlanta and I enjoy travelling with her: she lets me know she loves me by telling me when she feels I need to hear it.

So in a way she mothers me and, at 24 years of age, I understand she doesn’t need mothered anymore and she certainly doesn’t need smothered by my attention. We enjoy each others company but we are not best friends; we are mother and daughter.

Ashley came to watch my first night of comedy in Atlanta, then we went off somewhere quiet and she told me completely honestly what I did well and what should be cut from the show. She is my best critic and her insight into my comedy is helpful; she pulls no punches – she can kick my confidence with her sharp words and yet is my biggest ally.

I wish I had been as good a mother as she is a daughter. I always feel and I am sure I resonate with mothers around the world in this statement – I wish I had been a better mother.

It’s a heady confessional statement and one I don’t enjoy admitting, but I did things wrong that I wish I could go back and fix. Like many working mothers, I would extol the virtues of my independence, my right to earn my own cash and the values I was teaching my daughter, but ultimately I think I wasn’t there enough. Now I don’t regret being a working mother; I have worked since I was 16 years old. In my late teens my husband and I owned a bar and, three days after Ashley’s birth, I was back behind the bar not out of necessity for my job but as a relief to get away from all things baby. My pregnancy nearly killed me as I suffered from hyperemesis which is incurable constant vomiting and I had two episodes where I lapsed into unconsciousness and needed hospital attention throughout the horrible nine months.

The long and short of it was I needed to get my own body and mind back to me.

Straight away I have excused my own need to want back in the workplace. I don’t need to explain why I wanted to go back to work, but mother’s guilt will always compel me to do so and that’s my point with this article. We women always have to excuse ourselves for wanting our own life after we have delivered a life from our womb.

There is an old saying in my society in Scotland and it’s this – “As a mother you will always get it wrong. It’s something you never get right”

Men don’t get it easy. I know and this isn’t about them - its about the women who despite years of having the vote and not quite getting fair wages will still always feel some kind of defeat when it comes to trying to be a good mother.

When we go back to work we feel we have abandoned our child; when we stay at home we feel we are stifling them and not contributing financially.

Working mothers are still seen as women who can’t commit to a career. Despite years of progression we know that some bosses see us as a temporary stop gap till some other woman with only full commitment to the job comes along. Then she gets pregnant and the cycle continues. That’s just life.

Right now in Britain after the election that failed to elect, we have three men trying to share power in a hung parliament. Good luck to them trying to juggle running a country between them. I now feel that shared parenting has a fresh analogy to be drawn upon. Let’s see if three different blokes can raise a nation without regret!

It’s a difficult job. Luckily my husband and I were self employed and could share the care giving and work load of our job, yet I still feel I neglected my mothering duties!

My daughter has grown up and assures me she loves me and she understands that I did things for the best but I know that somewhere somehow I still never did it as best as I hoped I would.

It’s a feeling inside that I can’t explain and, on this Mother’s Day as we sit together in a hotel room chatting and writing, I wish I had time to do it all over again and this time try to do it perfectly. And yet accept there is no such thing as a perfect mum!

So, to all the mothers out there reading this, let’s just accept we did the best we could with the tools we had at the time and, as my own mother once told me, “If I can’t be a shining example, remember me as a dire warning.”

Happy Mother’s Day in the United States of America and well done mammies in the rest of the world.