Honoring My Mother On Mother’s Day By Keeping My Distance
Mother’s Day has always been a complicated, loaded one for me. As a kid, I loved and cherished the “holiday,” as I did my mother.
I typically cradle the word “holiday” in quotation marks when referencing Mother’s Day, and “holidays” like it, as I don’t know that they’re much more than occasions to purchase and send presents. Christmas is still, as of Mother’s Day, 230 days away, after all.
I’ve heard a lot from the faith community about the need to and the ways to honor mothers on Mother’s Day, most recently during a great YouTube broadcast with CeCe Winans, her own 85 year old mother, Delores, and her daughter (and new mother), Ashley.
I get it: the deity who was born of a virgin wants us to honor our mothers. I’m pretty sure that honoring your mother even merited a commandment, so it must be up there among the things you have to do if you want to walk those golden streets of glory that Dolly Parton and so many others have sung about.
But I have a fairly unconventional way of “honoring” my mother. For years now, I’ve driven her at least as close to the brink as she drives me. So I honor her (and maintain my own mental and emotional health) by keeping my distance.
Click here to read freelance writer MPC’s full Mother’s Day column, including his self-care tips.
Michael P Coleman is a Sacramento based freelance writer who has his eye on the Pulitzer Prize. Connect with him at michaelpcoleman.com or follow his blog, his IG and his Twitter.
