can we just take a minute to appreciate moms?

recently I came across an article on Facebook that absolutely infuriated me. 

now granted, this happens fairly frequently, and since Facebook does that whole thing where it shows you everything your friends like, share, and comment on, in no particular order other than what they've determine that you're most likely to click on, im not entirely sure how this article made it onto my feed.

but it did.

and while most of the time, I can let these upsetting articles pass into obscurity without comment, this one, I just can't let go. 

it was titled something along the lines of, "why I don't allow my son to celebrate Mother's Day" (im not even going to bother linking to because reading it again will just make me even more angry), it started of pleasantly enough, talking about how, as the writer put it, she does not expect or allow her son "to lavish her with expensive gifts and dinners once a year", which on the one hand i get, because that's not what life is all about, and props to you for not pushing arbitrary materialistic consumerism and unattainable expectations on your child in this one particular area. 

honestly, the article could have ended there and i would have been totally ok with it. 

but it didnt. 

she went on to a long winded, overtly academic, narcissistic, postmodernist tirade against not only mothers day, but mothers and motherhood in general. basically, this woman's entire arguement was that we should not even have a special day to celebrate mothers at all, because it's insensitive to all non-mothering women and being a mother doesn't make you any better or more valuable of a person anyway.

and this is where I have to step in and say no. 

stop. 

moms are a HUGE FREAKING DEAL. i would even go so far as to argue that moms are the most important people on earth. 

and taking a single day to acknowledge and celebrate that (cards, flowers, gifts, and dinners are really irrelevant here, we're talking about the sentiment), is the LEAST we can do. 

because moms do SO much (im talking about my own mom here), with no breaks, no pay, and very, very little recognition. and in my opinion, this is complete bs, because without moms, none of us would even exist. and because of this, we should be making a huge deal about our moms every day. 

now, I don't know anything about this woman, or her family, or her experience with motherhood/her own mother, and I REALLY don't want this post to turn into my own tirade about our cultures broad assertion that a mother is the absolute worst thing that a woman could choose or aspire to be (especially if she's young and/or chooses to stay at home, because god forbid anyone invest their time and energy into perpetuating the human race with a diverse array of quality individuals /end rant).

what really got to me about this article was the writers assertion that being a mom doesn't make you a better person. 

now, we could pretend that she was arguing that women that have procreated in the past are not inherently more valuable than other, non-procreating female humans (because on an ethical level, I'd agree with that particular statement), but I really don't think that's what she was trying to argue. because if she was, well, the topic of the article would probably have been something more along the lines of human ethics, and not how we shouldn't celebrate Mother's Day. 

she was arguing that the act of being a parent does not make you a better person, and that the 98% of people who believe this to be true (yes, she even brought in statistics) are ignorant fools. 

and this, this is just complete malarkey.

OF COURSE becoming a mom makes you a better person, or at least, it should. definitely not in the ways you'd expect, and certainly not right away or all at once, but I don't know a single mom (and I know LOTS of moms in all walks of life) that would say that being a mom doesn't make you a better person the you were before. 

because (speaking from experience here) as soon as you have a child under your care (whether biologically, or through marriage or adoption), it hits you like a ton of bricks that "holy crap. I am a HORRIBLE person and I better get my act together ASAP because I sure as heck can't justify letting another person as terrible as me live on this planet", and then you spend the whole rest of your life (slowly, clumsily, often failing along the way, but eventually) becoming the mom that this little person (or people) needs to have in order to grow up into a healthy, functioning adult (I do feel like often us moms of littles forget that this is the end goal). and amid endless diapers and sleepless nights and temper tantrums and mom-shaming about letting your kid watch Cartoon Network (real thing that happened to me) and birthday parties and all the other things that im not qualified to comment on because I only have a toddler, you do it. and it makes you a better person and it makes your kids better people and it makes the world a better place. 

and THAT is why Mother's Day NEEDS to be a big deal. 

not for me, not for my mom, but for all moms everywhere. 

so, happy Mother's Day mom, thank you for being an awesome mom so that I could grow up and be a mom too, I love you! 

(and thank you to everyone that made it all the way through this somewhat out of place socio-political rant, i promise ill be back to talking about food and dresses later this week)