Around 30 years ago, my family moved to the US from overseas.
In the country we came from, Mother’s Day wasn’t celebrated. When we got here, my 2 sisters and I thought it would be nice to get our mom something for the day. We went to K-Mart and found a purse we thought she’d like. After pooling our allowances together, we were just able to afford the purse.
On Mother’s Day, we put the gift in our parents’ room on our mom’s bureau. After that, the three of us got on with the day. At around noon, my mom went to her room and we heard her yelling for us. When we got up there, she screamed at us at full volume for getting her the purse. She said that she was sure our dad had put us up to it and was trying to insult her with her the purse. She then said that she deserved a better gift than the purse we got. We were all shell shocked for a while. Who’d think that giving your mom a gift was a bad thing?
After that incident, I’ve never celebrated Mother’s Day again. In later years, my mom would ask me why I never got her anything when all her friends’ kids got their moms gifts. I’d tell her that she had her shot to get a Mother’s Day gift and that I had no interest in getting yelled at again. She’d then tell me to stop living in the past.