Flowers for mothers is a stereotype my childfree and early-mother self would have raged or rolled her eyes at, but that's because my thinking was (is, sigh) deeply polluted by the anti-mother feeling that pervades U.S. culture—the sense that all mothers, good or bad, are essentially a joke (hi, mom jeans) and that to be one is to be something less than. (An assessment women, childfree or not, cannot escape whatever lives they choose.) Mother's Day is a cultural sop, a day of genuflection to a myth that pretends to elevate mothers while keeping them in their place, barricaded by bathrobes and brunches and greeting cards, making them a smooth, featureless monolith instead of a craggy and vast collection of individual humans practicing that most valuable and complicated human task in idiosyncratic and adaptive ways: caring for others.
I hate calling motherhood "work" because it pulls this wild and unpredictable and ever-evolving life-reshaping commitment down to the level of the time-wasting nonsense people get paid to do in cubicles, making it sound like it can be measured in dollars. And my life is not some sort of value-generating variable waiting to be quantified. But I do like the idea of taking a day to mark this experience, imperfect and individual as it is. Flowers, individual and imperfect themselves, subject to weather and climate and care and chance, don't feel like a limiting stereotype anymore. More like the movement of like toward like.
(P.S. Yes, I am aware of the irony of paring this micro rant with a list of buyable things. What can I say: I'm a product of my times.)
Nothing But Flowers exhibition catalog from Karma.
Catbird's flower-as-poetry charms, or Spiritual Objects' silver daisy.
Springtime chocolates by Shane Confectionery.
A béo bergamot soap colored with butterfly pea flower.
Music that blooms: Nala Sinephro's debut album, Space 1.8.
Trompe-l'œil daisy painting by Helen Betrand, ca. 1969.
