No Mother’s Day Gifts For Me!

Last night I crawled up into the roof storage in our shed, looking for crafty stuff my girls could take to school and use to make me a mothers present.

It was freezing up there, and as I shuffled through rat poop and spider webs to find ribbons and buttons I wondered, why on earth I was doing this? I don’t even celebrate Mother’s Day!

But I did it anyway.

And I will hand over my hard earned cash tomorrow so my girls can buy some bit of junk that I don’t want or need from the school mother’s day stall.

And I will smile and hug my boy and try not to cringe as I read what he has dictated to his kinder teachers about what my favourite things are.

And I’ll do all of this, not because Mother’s Day is important to me, but because we chose to part of the school and kinder community, and because doing these things is important to my children.

But I won’t buy into the commercialisation of Mother’s Day.

I don’t need a pink dressing gown, or pink fluffy slippers, or a pink blender or a pink coffee mug, or any of the other ‘pink for mother’s day’ items that filled the junk mail catalogs this week.

I don’t need my family to spend money on me to show me that they love me and appreciate what I do. I know they love me, and appreciate me, because they tell me, all the time.

I am lucky like that.

I am lucky in other ways too.

I am lucky that have all that I need. Of course there are lots of things I ‘want’ but there really is nothing I ‘need’… nothing at all.

I am lucky that I live in Australia. I can not shake the notion that I had been born in some other country, a country that is less affluent, a country without decent health care, a country without enough food… how different my life would be, how different my children’s lives would be. What if I was a mother in Niger? Save the Children’s State of the World’s Mothers Report has just name Niger as the worst place to be a mother…

So while it’s no secret that I don’t ‘believe’ in Mother’s Day, and I won’t be getting any presents on Sunday, that doesn’t mean I can’t give one… or two… to another mother, who isn’t quite as lucky as I am.

Today I’ve given some water purification tablets, a bag of seed and two chickens (my kids helped me choose) to families in need via World Vision Gifts. Such an easy way to give and meaningful for my kids as they can choose an item that means something to them.

I’ve also contributed to another loan via Good Return to help a mother in Nepal start a pig farm to help make ends meet. You can contribute directly or but your Mum a gift certificate so that she can choose who to support (and she gets the money when the loan is re-payed, or she can choose to reinvest!).

It’s not much, and while Mother’s day is not important to me, I choose to be part of the world community, and these little things, these small gifts, are important to someone.