Happy Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day in the UK. An annual celebration of our Mother's and their place in our hearts. All very lovely, commendable and nice.

To me Mother's Day is all about handmade cards and daffodils, these seem to symbolise what Mother's Day was like for me. Pasta shapes stuck to a card with copious amounts of PVA glue and covered in glitter. Bunches of daffodils from the local florist or picked from the garden, or picked from someone else's garden if you came from a poor background like me. 

But how things have changed.

Now it seems to be that social networking has stolen the innocence of Mother's Day away. It now seems like there is a strong desire for people to rush to Facebook and extol the virtues of their mothers on there. Again, this can be viewed as lovely, commendable and nice, if you are posting on your mother's wall and she is actually on Facebook to reply.

My mother has no concept of Facebook, my mother had no concept of Facebook when she was alive! So I have no desire to run to the social networking sites and literally shout "Happy Mother's Day!" to my long dead mother who has no internet connection or WiFi enabled headstone!

But people do this and I for one cannot fully understand it. That may seem harsh, but I think it says more about the person posting the comments, than it does about the dead relative. To me it says; "look at me, how righteous am I? I'm remembering my dead relative by posting a status on Facebook".

I guess we have been doing this kind of thing for years, by posting a memorial tribute in the local paper, but even that I feel is a tad morbid, for me the connection between myself and my mother, especially on days like today is purely spiritual. There's no physical entity left, so to have a physical conversation, via whatever medium; Facebook, newspaper etc. is meaningless. I would say you really only need to have thoughts of remembrance and send those thoughts into the nothingness of space and so if there is any spiritual ethernet, those thoughts will travel to your dearly departed and the job is done. There's no requirement to broadcast your message to everyone on your timeline. Instead keep those messages special, meaningful and targeted via thoughts alone.

Does my opinion make me a bad person? I hope not. I fully understand the need to grieve the loss of your parents, I have lost both of mine and I still miss them, but I don't run to the hills with a billboard shouting it, or post great swathes of sadness on Facebook or wherever. I send them my best wishes by thought alone. Surely that's enough?

These are just my thoughts. Feel free to have yours.