Every Day is Mother’s Day in Hell

My family hasn’t gone to a restaurant on Mother’s Day in my living memory, so this article caught my eye last week. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was a bad idea to brave the restaurant scene on M-Day, but the quote, “‘Every server knows that working on Mother’s Day is hell. In fact, if I die and go to hell, I completely expect it to be Mother’s Day. 365 days a year,’ wrote Darron Cardosa, in his book The Bitchy Waiter: I’m Really Good at Pretending to Care,” will live in my memory for years. As I alluded to earlier this year, everyone should know how to cook at least one tasty meal. MINIMALLY ONE. How hard is pasta, you know what I mean? You need ONE to fall back on (and just so we’re clear, if you cook on Mother’s Day, you also need to CLEAN UP AFTERWARD.)

It feels like a lot of people don’t, though, and as a result they go to restaurants on Mother’s Day. Which, to me, has always sent the message: “Mom, you do so much for us. Today, you don’t have to lift a finger. Oh, we won’t either. No, we’ll pay someone to do it for us. But the important thing is, you don’t have to cook and neither do we.”

I think Mother’s Day is hard for everybody. It’s a lot of pressure to try to show a year’s worth of appreciation in a single day, and I can only guess that mothers nationwide feel pressured to show that they’re having a great time, even if they aren’t. I imagine it’s like sitting in front of a birthday cake while everyone around you sings, and you don’t really know what you should do until the song wraps up (nod along, conduct with your hands, watch time dilate as 20 seconds stretches out into infinity?)… but all day long. Feelings are hard.

So, I hope everyone who celebrated Mother’s Day this year had a good one. And I’d like to propose a moment of silence for the restaurant staff everywhere who knowingly jumped into hell, where their feelings may or may not have been as valuable as an iced tea refill.

And by god, if you went out to eat yesterday and didn’t tip generously, may your mother’s be “not mad, just disappointed” with you for at least a month.