Before I put my mom in her place, does this sound fair?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why is no one celebrating the current, active mothers with young kids?? Why is this a war of which granny gets the most butt kissing? Boomers suck.

Hi, weird obsessive Mother’s Day “Granny” poster! Amazed it took you this many responses to get here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pretty much every year Mother’s Day goes like this for my brother: He invites our mom out to brunch/lunch on Saturday. I’m usually invited with them, rarely we bring our kids and spouses. It’s always a nice afternoon centered around mom and her children. We usually wander to a park after we eat to walk around, sometimes grabbing dessert.

On Sunday in the past he’s watched the kids while his wife visits her mom for brunch. But in the past two years he’s been tagging along because they’ve made it a larger family reunion-type gathering now that there are more grandkids.

(FWIW, I’d say 50/50 on Sunday I will also visit my mom, but it depends on how my week ahead looks. I did visit with her briefly this year.)

My mom can’t get over the fact that my brother spends MD with SIL’s mom and not her. She cries fat tears and will complain about it for weeks. I’m so sick of hearing about it. He has a wife with kids and that’s his main priority, and it should be! I want to speak up on my brother’s behalf and put her in her place, but first I need to know if the way we treat MD sounds fair. What do you think?

This to me is the flaw in your and your mom’s thinking. He is celebrating her exclusively the day before. Because it’s not on Sunday does not make it less of a “priority”. She has exclusive, attentive, and special treatment within 24 hours of some weirdly created, arbitrary day. Aside from that, it sounds like this is the tradition for this particular day.

So in that, I don’t get the “the way we treat MD sounds fair”. Mother is being celebrated, bracketing a made up holiday. I think it sounds fair.m

You don’t need to defend your brother, because there is nothing to defend. You can certainly set your boundary about not being manipulated into celebrating something different or hearing about it. Yiu can help your mother reframe her experience, which may have her feeling left out on the actual day, but yiu need to help her share the experience of the day before as the celebration.