Three years ago, I found a gorgeous pair of boots and swooned over them for months. My husband encouraged me to buy them, and when they went on sale in April, I finally pulled the trigger. I made a condition with him, though: He had to hold on to them and give them to me as a Mother’s Day gift — that helped me wrap my head around the splurge, and I knew I’d always associate the boots with a special day.
Except … when Mother’s Day finally rolled around, he presented me with a different present entirely: A gift card for a spa day. He had forgotten about the boots. And sure, a spa day sounded lovely … but it wasn’t at all what I wanted.
What I wanted was tucked away in our closet. What I didn’t want? The mental load of planning my spa day: Finding a time that would work on my end, scheduling the appointments, figuring out which treatment I wanted. I wasn’t wild about the impersonality of a gift card either.
My sweet husband apologized profusely for forgetting about the boots. But I don’t think he — or even I, at the time — fully understood why I felt so let down in that moment.
I had done the thing every mother is told she should do in order to make sure she has the Mother’s Day of her dreams: I had communicated, even though all I wanted was for someone to just anticipate my wants.
I’m certainly not the only mom who has experienced Mother’s Day letdown. And yes, I can already hear the responses. “You’re so ungrateful”. “You’re so difficult to please”. “You’re so privileged”. I get all that.
But I also get the real crux of Mother’s Day letdown. Because for so many moms, understanding exactly what everyone else in their household wants and needs is a constant. In many — if not most — cases, we don’t ask our partners and our kids to tell us what they want, or how they want their special days to unfold. We just … figure it out.
Yet when Mother’s Day comes around, and the tables turn, the magic doesn’t quite manifest. At least not without a lot of legwork, communication, and decision-making from the people who are already riddled with never-ending decision fatigue.
It doesn’t help, of course, that Mother’s Day happens to fall smack dab in the middle of “Maycember.” At this point in the year, every single mom I know is even more up to her neck in decision-making than usual. She’s deciding what cookies to bake for teacher appreciation week. She’s fine-tuning the summer schedule (which, by the way, she started working on in January). She’s cycling out her kids’ cold-weather clothing and figuring out who needs new shorts to carry them through the warmer months. She’s juggling her calendar to see if she can volunteer for a few of the 50 in-school events that’ll happen this month. She … is me. And she’s probably you, too.
There’s definitely some guilt that comes along with Mother’s Day letdown, even though I know I’m not alone in feeling it. Every year, I log in to social media the day after Mother’s Day and come across multiple takes from moms who felt completely disappointed by how the day unfolded. In a Facebook moms’ group I belong to, several moms express feeling hurt or under-appreciated after their partners failed to plan much, write a thoughtful card, or select an appropriate gift.
The reactions are almost always the same: “If you wanted the day to go a certain way, you should have communicated that to him,” others will say.
But I call BS on this. Motherhood involves so much invisible labor, but Mother’s Day shouldn’t have to — and feeling seen is something most moms crave above all else on this special day. It’s less about the contents of the gift box, or message in the card, or the details of the day. It’s about feeling understood and seen and appreciated … and like the people in your life have put real thought into expressing that appreciation.
Paige Connell, an influencer and mom of four, has shared content about Mother’s Day letdown and the role decision fatigue plays in all of this. Her audience is largely in agreement: Many moms want a break from orchestrating, yet Mother’s Day only adds to their mental load.
I spoke with Connell to hear more of her thoughts on why moms are frequently let down and why telling them to just better communicate their needs isn’t the answer.
“I think Mother’s Day is a day where, if Mom doesn’t want to make any decisions or do any planning, she shouldn’t have to. Her family should know her well enough to be able to take care of her and to celebrate her and thank her,” says Connell.
According to Connell (and me), a partner asking a mom where she wants to eat brunch or what she wants to do on Mother’s Day can leave her feeling even more unseen. And the narrative that if a mom is disappointed, she just didn’t communicate her needs clearly enough? It’s not helpful.
“We often blame communication issues on women’s lack of communication within a relationship, [but] I don’t necessarily think that it’s due to inaction or lack of communication on women’s part,” says Connell. “I would say if you explicitly want to go to brunch at your absolute favorite restaurant and you want to go at 11 a.m., then yes, you need to communicate certain things, especially if you have very specific desires. But if your desire is to spend a day with your family where you don’t have to make any decisions, and you get to eat good food, and you’re open to what that looks like? Then I don’t think you should have to explicitly express that to your partner.”
The thing about communication we need to remember, too, is that it doesn’t always yield the desired result (see: Bootgate ‘22). I hear from countless moms who say they’ve made their Mother’s Day desires very, very clear — yet they still weren’t met. In many cases, it’s not that a mom didn’t drop enough hints or make her requests explicitly enough. It’s that most non-mothers haven’t had to flex that magic-making, plan-executing skill to the extent mothers have. That’s why we’re so desperate to relinquish some of that control, yet have such a hard time doing so. Because we know, deep down, that without us pulling the strings, things likely won’t meet the standards we uphold for everyone else’s special days.
“Every other day of the year, [moms] feel like they’re the person coordinating and deciding things for everybody else … and very rarely do other people do that for them,” says Connell.
She’s right. We want to feel celebrated with the same level of care we provide for everyone else and we want a break from the relentless mental load and the pressure of spinning magic from the mundane. And in light of all we do for everyone else, that doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
These celebrities shared the important & heartwarming life lessons they learned from their moms.