PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 13 May 2009 Issue (Page E-3)

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, too, but it seems to me that we tend to commemorate Mother’s Day by hastily making plans for it, executing them, and then forgetting about them immediately afterward. We all appear to be contented with celebrating Mother’s Day in a dizzying flurry of restaurants, flowers, and cards, culminating in one shining, momentary expression of love that’s akin to a display of fireworks: dazzling and noisy until it ends in a quiet cloud of smoke that dissipates in a matter of minutes, leaving no traces that it ever happened.

Mother’s Day has become just another date to be crossed out on our calendars, and it’s sad because most of us aren’t even aware of it. We make so much of a fuss over how to celebrate it to the point that we come to measure its value by the success of our grandiose plans or the grandness of our tiny gestures. To put it simply, we worry so much about Mother’s Day that we forget to worry about Mother.

This was what I realized last Sunday, when we didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day.

Or at least, we didn’t in the normal(ized) sense of the word. We couldn’t. Father was busy winning the bread—he had a lecture to give for the whole day; I was caught up with writing my papers and studying for the week’s coming long tests. Only Little Sister and Littler Brother had little enough to do to be able to contemplate how we were going to make a gesture, and they only did so the day before when, in the absence of the annual orders from High Command regarding Operation: Mom Day—something of a yearly tradition for us—they realized that the fate of the holiday was in their hands. In practical terms, it meant that the budget would come from their own pockets.

To their credit, they managed to arrange for a humble gesture at midnight, consisting of a card we bought thanks to the P40 remaining in Little Brother’s pocket, and our best hugs for the greatest mom in the whole wide world, which were free. Many of our conceived plans failed: Father failed to buy flowers because his car broke down (I had to pick him up from his lecture that night), and I failed to buy Krispy Kreme since I cancelled my plans for a night out. But despite the apparent lameness of our gestures, for which we had to make lame excuses (“Mom, we’re just driving out to…um, buy…uh, DVDs…”), Mom appreciated the fact that we made an effort. I think she wasn’t even expecting that we would, or could.

But when I look back on all the years we’ve shopped for, surprised, and even scared the bejesus out of Mother, I find that all her reactions are similar. The amount of effort, money or time we spend in planning for Mother’s Day isn’t directly proportional to the amount of appreciation she has for the gestures we make. I suspect that if I bought her something amazingly expensive, her reaction would stay the same. I guess mothers are just special that way, loving you all the same even if your gestures are unoriginal, overused and lame.

Part of the point I’m trying to make is practical. Spending more money on expensive donuts and even more expensive hotel dinners won’t make Mother’s Day any more special than if you stayed home and cooked her dinner. In fact, the opposite may be true: she’d probably be more touched if you made her a macaroni card with a doodle of her in front and a touching message inside. After all, grand gestures are only of worth if there’s grand love behind it.

But more importantly, the point is that Mother’s Day is not just another holiday. It is not about the restaurants, the flowers and the cards. It never was to begin with. The fact that we bother ourselves so much with these little things causes us to forget about the big picture, or worse, distort it. Mother’s Day is supposed to leave a mark, not disappear into ashes until we decide to light it up again.

Mother’s Day is not about that one shining moment where she is momentarily significant; it is about reminding her that she has always been significant. And if we spend the day simply going through the convenient motions of a Hallmark holiday without going beyond the clichés to tell her, honestly, how we feel, then Mother’s Day isn’t worth celebrating. It becomes a fake, plastic holiday.

We can’t celebrate Mother’s Day if every other day wasn’t mother’s day for us to begin with.

This article is dedicated to all the mothers who didn’t get to celebrate Mother’s Day, but is most especially dedicated to my Mom. I love you!