What I Want for Mother's Day

Ah, Mother’s Day. I don’t give a shit about it, because my own mom (bless her heart) didn’t give a shit about it. I still send her an enormous and over-priced box of Godiva chocolates every year though, because that’s the only thing she eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. ("I learned it from watching you, Mom. I learned it from watching you!”)

Since my mom is turning 70 this year and we live very far apart, it’s once again time to start cherishing the living shit out of my mother. And believe me, I do. In ways that can’t be put into words.

What I can put into words though, is what every mom on the Internet seems to be putting into words, which is a sarcastic, irreverent list of what they want for Mother’s Day. Lots of these include funny tongue-in-cheek items like wanting to pee alone and wanting to get drunk at brunch. Both of which are great gifts.

So I figured I would add to the cacophony. Here’s my list, not all of which pertains to being a mother, at least not directly. And although sarcasm and irreverence are my stock-in-trade, this is a slightly more serious list.

Here's what I want for Mother’s Day. I want my daughter:

1. To never have to fight and argue and lobby and plead for the same salary as her male counterparts with the same qualifications, even/especially from other women.

2. To believe that she can be an engineer, a surgeon, a computer scientist, or a mathematician.

3. To be able to buy birth control over the counter and live in a world where her right to enjoy sex and plan a family with the aid of modern medicine is considered at least as valid as an 80 year old man's desire to maintain an erection.

4. To love her body at any size and have a healthy, balanced relationship with both food and exercise.

5. To be oblivious to magazines.

6. To never be called “hon” or “little girl” or “gal” or be told to “smile more” or to “make better eye contact” or that her new haircut “will do” or any of the other things that her own mother was told by men and women alike at countless workplaces since entering the workforce at the age of 17.

7. To have somewhere besides a toilet bowl to sit and breastfeed her baby.

8. To be able to walk to her car after work, wearing anything she wants to, even if her car is parked far away and in a dimly-lit place, and not worry about being verbally or sexually harassed, or worse.

9. To never look to a man for "approval" of her life choices or her physical appearance.

10. Oh. And for her to listen to everything I say and stop antagonizing me. Just for that one day.