Yo' Mama.

So it's Mother's Day again. Eschewing predictable flowers and candy, I paid for my mother to "adopt" a Blue-Footed Booby from the World Wildlife Fund, complete with adoption certificate and plush bird. She loved it, as she should; how many mothers can say they got a Blue-Footed Booby for Mother's Day?

What's a bit disconcerting is the treatment of Mother's Day as a common holiday like Thanksgiving or Independence Day. I am constanly being wished a happy Mother's Day by men and women alike, people who don't know me. On the street, at the supermarket checkout, they wish me a Happy Mother's Day, which I imagine is what it must feel like to be a Jew and be wished Merry Christmas all the time. I don't want to be ungracious and so I accept the well-wishes in the spirit with which they're intended, but I confess that it irritates me, the assumption that I am a mother simply because I am a woman and this is the inevitable choice.

My friend Muriel gave me the perfect line, since she deals with this also:

"Honey, the only thing I push out of my body is dinner."

Click here to read an interesting story in the Chicago Tribune.