Mother’s Day is fast approaching; time to lock in on a gift for your mummy and the mother figures in your life, time to dust off your favourite lyrical odes to mothers and unfortunately, time to suffer through persons waxing poetic about the women they mistreat and demean for the rest of the year.

For starters, let the records show that I don’t quite like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. You see Father’s Day in Jamaica is rarely used as an opportunity to laud fathers. It is instead largely used as a platform to criticize absenteeism in fathers, while offering an afterthought’s worth of attention to the nation’s dedicated dads. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, is almost always an over-the-top occasion where we praise the strength and dignity of mothers in the face of adversity.

So, what’s not to like, you ask? A few things, actually.

Firstly, celebratory days are for celebrating good things and good persons, not for dredging up the bad. Somehow both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, in their own different ways, always end up being clouded over by bad. On Father’s Day we spend more time attempting to browbeat bad dads than celebrate good dads, so much so that the 24 hours more or less slip away with good dads not getting their fair share of spotlight. And on Mother’s Day we run the risk of praising so enthusiastically our mothers’ virtues in adversity that we make motherhood synonymous with, or all about, hardship.

The glorification of maternal pain and suffering is unsettling. With the host of gender equity and equality challenges perhaps the last thing women need is for their sacrifice and labour of love to be made into some sort of ideal, or to become once-a-year hit wonders, only to go unthanked and underappreciated til next year.

Secondly, in light of the apparent recent increase in domestic violence issues ending in men killing their female partners, there’s never been an easier time to spot the hypocrisy of the Jamaican male. In addition to the island’s number of domestic violence cases and Jamaica’s issue with gender based violence, many don’t have to look far for proof that as a nation we just might not love our mothers as much as we claim to. After all, who can really love their mother but be absolutely okay with hurting someone else’s mother? Who can love their mother and see the struggle she faces but gleefully add to her sorrows? How can anyone love their mummy, talk so ardently about how much she endures as a single mother, but readily fast-track other women to becoming single mothers with little to no hope of support? Who loves their mother and believes in her inherent value as a woman and as a person, but fails to see the inherent value of every other woman?

Just in case you struggled to answer the questions above, you can’t. Those things are – or are quite nearly – impossible. This is not to say that there won’t be disagreements. Because there will be, and that’s okay. After all, tongue and teeth must meet. But at the end of the proverbial day, persons who love their mothers, and by extension also love and respect other mothers and non-mothers around them, do not dishonour them or seek to cause them unnecessary stress or grief.

The hypocrisy has to end some time; end it now. Before you bellow out Sizzla’s Thank You Mama and get fake deep on social media this Mother’s Day, think about whether you actually love your mother, and think about what that love is supposed to mean, and how it ought to be clear. Be as over the top as you think you need to be in celebrating your mother and the mother figures you love, just mean it.