Thanks, KS Toronado!

Thanks for these KS Tornado😀

Thank you.

I love the cartoons about forced motherhood, kids hugging stressed out moms and making breakfast for them. I hate the stereotypes, sexism, and... misleading (for lack of a better word) in some of the cartoons.

I didn't like:
* the sappy, Hallmark card of platitudes showing three sets of (white) hands, talking about mothers as nurturers, caring, loving. Not all mothers are like that, and this was illustrated well in another cartoon in the read where it acknowledged some mothers are (Black) "Baltimore mothers," who are tough as nails. That's a more realistic representation of mothers everywhere.

* the military mom getting a Mother's Day package from her kids. This one wouldn't have bothered me if it weren't for the fact that our military in Iran aren't getting their care packages from home these days.

* the sexist stereotypes of women having to go to the doctor for eating their husbands' cooking, or the mother nagging her adult son to clean up after himself after he brought her flowers, or the father telling his kid that making his bed is a great gift for his mom.

Mostly I'm just bitter that a holiday that arose after the Civil War, to promote peace so "mothers wouldn't ever have to suffer their sons being lost to war again" was turned into a sentimental slop of a day that gives platitudes to mothers while we also culturally deny (or seek to deny) them access to safe and legal reproductive healthcare, voting rights, and interstate travel.

https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/history-mothers-day-global-peace-greeting-cards

Even more specifically, by an all-white, all-male Congress in 1914. It's not the commoditization of the holiday, it's the removal of its peace message, including changing the day and month of the holiday, to make it about sentimentality and divorce it from any antiwar message. Consider the time period: one of the most popular songs of the day, first published in 1911, was "I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad." Literally, a song about men wanting to marry their mothers. During the rise of the Suffragettes, menfolk worked hard to romanticize motherhood, promote motherhood, and brainwash women that being on a pedestal with babies underneath them is so much better than voting.

Happy Mother’s Day ☀️🪸🎂

Happy Mother's Day!

It was complicated...humans often are

And the one that included Nana on the stone got to me, since my Nana meant the world to me...