How to make the most of Mother’s Day

It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday and the shops seem to have been advertising it for months. There are flowers everywhere. Will you get a lie-in and wake up to a spotless house, will you settle back in front of a good film while children feed you chocolate and tell you how amazing you are – like they do in the ads – or will you be up early organising a celebration for your own mum?  Or is Mother’s Day just an elaborate ploy to make other people feel okay about you doing most of the work on the other 364 days of the year and will the cards be swiftly replaced by the Easter onslaught? Here’s our guide to how to squeeze as much as you can out of the 24 hours that make up Mothering Sunday.

Be clear about how you want it to go

Make a list of your top five Mother’s Day things and steer things in that direction. If you know that cleaning generally results in more work for you scratch all mention from the list. Stick to the easy stuff like letting you have a lie in. Emphasise that ALL mothers get a lie-in on Mother’s Day and spell out what this involves in detail to avoid confusion. Spell it out in capitals with glitter if necessary. Specify a precise time at which it might be okay to wake you, unless, of course, there is a genuine emergency.

Keep it low key

Do not exaggerate the importance of Mother’s Day. The chances are if you hype it that you will excite the younger members of the family so much that they will want to wake you up early to celebrate, thus completely missing the entire point of the day. Teenagers will probably allow you the lie-in on the grounds that they won’t get up till noon.

Rose tint the past

Talk about what you did for your mum in your youth and slightly embellish that to create some sort of sense of tradition, eg “We let her spend the whole day in bed and did a complete spring clean of the house.”

Breakfast in bed

If making breakfast is on your list, give a suggested hour and ask for a menu. If not you could find the whole house turned upside down or yourself being force fed some combination of marmalade and Rice Crispies at 5am. NB the clocks go forward this weekend. Don’t let the kids know.

Thinking about it

Emphasise that it is not about presents, but about thoughtfulness. Let them ponder on that one for a few days, particularly the teenagers.

Celebrate it every day?

Discuss whether in an age of supposed equality Mother’s Day is just one big excuse to overload mothers on all the other days of the year. If Mother’s Day simply means getting the odd lie-in and sharing the housework shouldn’t it be celebrated all year round…?

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