The “All About My Mom” worksheet that Chrissy Powers received from her daughter, Ruby, last Mother’s Day offered some surprises.
First, that Ms. Powers was 21. (She was 42.)
Second, that Ruby’s favorite thing to do with her mother was baking.
“We’ve literally baked a cake together once,” said Ms. Powers, a family therapist in San Diego. “I didn’t realize how meaningful that was to her until I got that quote-unquote report card.” The mother of three (Ruby was 5 at the time) proceeded to “psychoanalyze” the feedback in a post on TikTok.
Dusty Stanfield, 47, works from home in Fulshear, Texas, as a marketing specialist for athletes — a job that looks like sitting on the couch to the youngest of his five children. In preschool, his son stated in a Father’s Day survey that “he basically does nothing.”
Parenting, Mr. Stanfield said, is a “work in progress.”
It is also a long game. We invest love, energy and strategy, then wait 18 to 30-plus years for the results. Until then, it can be hard to assess our progress. Yet once a year, the cards that children create for their parents — whether it’s for Mother’s Day in May or Father’s Day in June — offer a window, or a fun-house mirror, into how we’re doing and how they perceive us.
In 2020, Claire Zulkey in Evanston, Ill., was given a dressed-up paper towel roll in lieu of a card. “When I received this piece of actual garbage with just, like, “mom, mom, mom, mom, mom” written on it in Sharpie,” said Ms. Zulkey, 46, the creator of the Evil Witches Substack, “you’re like, ‘OK, a little effort here?’” She made sure to note that her two wonderful children, 9 and 12, have put in ample effort on other occasions.
Casey Scieszka, an author and innkeeper in West Kill, N.Y., felt like a “cartoon mom on the internet” after reading her the Mother’s Day questionnaire her child, then 6, completed last year: The profile “said my favorite food was salad and my favorite drink was wine.” Ms. Scieszka, 41, realized that picking greens to assemble a salad (while one of them, yes, enjoyed a goblet of wine) had become a ritual for them, and she was touched. But, “God, what have my children said that doesn’t even make it into the Mother’s Day card?” she added.
Nick Singleton, 40, got rave reviews from his middle child, who is 6, for installing the Baby Hazel game on her iPad. “You think it’s going to be because of the unconditional love I give them,” said the digital marketing specialist from his home in Atlanta, but instead, “she drew a picture of me handing her tablet back to her on the couch.”
EP, a 48-year-old academic in upstate New York, was drawn on the border of a family portrait by their son, then 6. “As someone whose kid calls them ‘Mapa’ and doesn’t easily identify as ‘mom’, we try to squeeze into that frame, obviously awkwardly,” said EP, who uses they/them pronouns and asked to use their initials out of concern for their family’s safety. They went on to note how perceptive the drawing was about the gender binary.
In Richmond, Ky., Hunter Barker Rogers, a 42-year-old intensive care nurse and former paramedic, did not register how much her career had figured into her daughter River’s imagination until a kindergarten questionnaire stated her job as “ambulance girl” (and her age as “74”). Cleary, River, now 8, had been watching closely, and today, she “runs a little medical center out of her Barbie Dreamhouse,” her mother said.
Gratitude Is a Gift
Katina Papson, a 47-year-old high school teacher, said these holidays were noninclusive of some of the families she worked with in San Francisco. She said she would rather receive “occasional gratitude” as a mother herself than be celebrated once a year.
In the United States, 6.5 billion cards are sold a year, according to the Greeting Card Association, and Mother’s Day is the second-most popular seasonal category behind Christmas/holiday, a spokesperson told The New York Times. Any card expressing appreciation gives parents “a shot in the arm,” Ms. Papson said. “Like, ‘You’re doing a good job, keep going.’”
Her sentiment hits on the undercurrent of anxiety in parenting. Nancy Reddy, an author and teacher, researched the origins of scientists’ attempts to measure maternal performance in her new book, “The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom,” which outlined the limitations of research into attachment.
Mary Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” experiment in the 1970s had caregivers leave their toddler in a room for psychologists to surveil. “The idea is that the child’s behavior during that absence and then on the parent’s return tells you what kind of an attachment” you have, Ms. Reddy said. This is a seductive concept for parents: “Twenty minutes and someone can tell you if you’ve done it right,” Ms. Reddy said.
Attachment studies have become so pervasive in pop culture partly because “we are not ourselves reliable assessors of our own parenting,” added Ms. Reddy, who has kept her children’s “report cards.” “There’s so much anxiety for parents in general,” she said, “about how we’re doing.”
Lindsay Ulray, 40, a perinatal mental health therapist in Livermore, Calif., said she tells clients, “If you’re having those worries and if you’re thinking those thoughts, you already are a good-enough mom.”.
Dr. Ulray, who was once crowned the “best mom evr,” treasures a photo from the last Mother’s Day of herself carrying her younger child before her spinal injury. The therapist, who has been “mothering in a disabled body” for three-and-a-half years, said she found it easier post-injury to see that the stereotype of the good mother was impossible to live up to.
And perhaps you can never fully know yourself as a parent.
Jonathan Maurer, 40, a producer, recently fetched some old Father’s Day cards from his currently uninhabitable home in Altadena, Calif., which was close to the path of the Eaton fire in January.
He described one of his favorites over text: “It opens the wrong way, has my name written backward and the image on the inside is … anybody’s guess.”
The post Time for Our Performance Review: Mother’s Day Cards appeared first on New York Times.
