The best Mother’s Day gift

If your algorithms are anything like mine, they have been serving you a steady diet of Mother’s Day gift guides, jokes and memes for the last few weeks.

I am into it. I need all the help I can get to plan and execute a meaningful Mother’s Day for my mom and the mother of my children. I found these two gift guides particularly interesting this year from The New York Times’ Wirecutter and Southern Living.

Allow me to pause here for a New South Essays public service announcement: If you have not yet planned for how you will honor the mothers in your life, stop reading and go to the store this very instant. You are in mortal danger.

You must purchase an overabundance of gifts to make up for your lack of preparation and wrap them or have them wrapped with such beauty and care that your recipients are distracted from your procrastination. Next, you must go to a grocery store and buy the ingredients to prepare extravagant meals (yes, meals, plural… breakfast, lunch and dinner) on Mother’s Day because there are no restaurant reservations left to be had and no mom wants to wait on brunch for hours because you failed to plan.

Finally, you must make every arrangement so that your offspring acknowledge their mother. If you say, “Well, she’s not MY mother. They should plan it,” you are again in mortal danger. You must plan something on their behalf that is so breathtaking that the celebrated mom no longer cares that the children she birthed or raised (or both) and sacrificed for are so self-absorbed and thoughtless that they couldn’t be bothered to plan a nice gift for their mother. Once you have done all of this, you can come back and finish reading this post, but not until then. OK, end of public service announcement.

Mother’s Day content tends to focus on food and gifts, but I think the real secret to honoring the mothers in your life is more fundamental. Moms have so much to do and plan that what they really want out of this day is to not have to make decisions.

Even making poor choices will be received better than forcing them to make one more decision. They will appreciate the effort. What they will not appreciate is giving them options that requires them to do the work that you should have done. You know the woman. Do your best to make a menu she would like, buy gifts that will bring her joy and plan a day of activities that help her feel special and appreciated. If you can’t do that, you’ve got bigger problems. Make a plan, commit to it, and execute it with attention to detail and a recognition of reality.

If Mother’s Day is really about the mothers, then don’t make it about you. Think about the day from their perspective, not about how much you will have to do on the day. If there are small kids in the family, giving her a break may be the best gift. Take them camping for the weekend. Take them to the park for a few hours. Feed them, dress them and entertain them so that Mom does not have to do all of that. Don’t take them to do something too special or Mom will feel left out. Take them to do something she would have had to do with them that she hates, like buying groceries. Not only will it give her a break, the rank unpleasantness of the experience will help you appreciate her more. And tell her that when you get home. She will revel in your misery when you try to do what she deals with on a regular basis.

Second, grand gestures have their place, but if the moms in your life have responsibility for the household finances, you could be inadvertently injecting stress into their day. This can be especially true if you failed to plan and default to a grand (and expensive) gesture to make up for it that costs more than your budget will allow. This kind of gift may evoke an “Awww, you shouldn’t have,” but the unspoken, internal response will be “Awww, you SHOULDN’T have.”

Third, the double whammy of bad Mother’s Day experiences not only put the onus of decision making on mom, it includes components that requires her to clean up the mess. Breakfast in bed? Don’t do it. No one wants breakfast in bed. Especially if when they get out of said bed the kitchen is a wreck because you and the kiddos used every pot and pan making toast and eggs.

If the moms in your life have control issues, (which stem from always having to do everything, by the way) you may be tempted to think they want to control their Mother’s Day. This is an easy trap to fall into. The deception is based in the same conditions that cause her to be controlling: you have abdicated your responsibilities and she knows she has to control everything or stuff won’t get done.

If this too much real talk for you to handle on the day before Mother’s Day, and you are worried that you have royally blown it this year, it’s OK. Do your best. Look at your plan and remove as many decisions as possible from her day. Determine to do better and start your planning earlier next year.

A good rule of thumb: when you put away the Easter baskets, let that be your reminder to take care of your Mother’s Day gifts and plans. Put an item on your calendar for the Monday after Easter with the link to one of the gift guides you read the day before Mother’s Day this year. That will at least get you started.

If all else fails, give the mothers in your life something they almost never have: peace and quiet in their own home.