What to do when Mother’s Day is Mothers’ Day: How to celebrate two moms

Thinking back on childhood, holidays and special occasions were the rhythms and the markers of the year. When my grandmothers were still around, the extended family did a big brunch on Sunday morning and everybody got dressed up and the women got corsages. It was fancy for fancy’s sake, but we have so many great pictures from those days.

When you’re little, it feels like you’re the one doing Mother’s Day—you’re throwing the party and Dad’s just, you know, driving and footing the bill. You never really think about Mother’s or Father’s Day as something the family or the partner is making special or the thought and care that goes into creating traditions and memories.

Our first couple of years as moms, we got cards for each other while we planned a bigger celebration for our mothers (and grandmothers and aunts). We thought, “These are supposed to feel like bigger days than this,” but we both got why they weren’t.

This year, we’ll have a six-month-old and a toddler—so, you know, excellent party planners. (Get it together, Kids.)

So for a while, at least, it will be up to each of us to facilitate celebrating the other. And for us, it’s not just about what we want to do this year: It’s about what we want to do about Mother’s Day, forever.

Because we’re queer, our family doesn’t fit all the scripts for holidays and special occasions. I don’t experience our exclusion from these norms entirely as a burden. The writer/poet Ocean Vuong said, “Often we see queerness as a deprivation, but when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me, I had to make alternative routes.”

I love that being a queer parent requires innovation and makes room for expansive definitions of family and family rituals. And because we are new to having a family, we get to think about how all the big and little rituals and traditions are going to go.

Mother's and Father's Day celebrations for LGBTQ parents

Every couple and family approaches special days their own way, and LGBTQ+ folks have even more options to consider. For example:

• We know queer couples who each select Mother’s or Father’s Day, as well as single parents who opt in for both.
• Some partners love to celebrate the same way, while others split the celebrations so they each can choose a favourite activity.
• They might divvy up the day, declare a Mothers’ Weekend, or go all in for a whole week.
• You can choose a date based on Mother’s Day celebrations in different countries and cultures.
• For some folks, gendered holidays don’t feel right at all. They might celebrate Nonbinary Parent’s Day on the third Sunday in April, Transgender Parent Day (or Trans-Parent Day) on the first Sunday in November or choose their own special days.

I’ll admit it: Though we’ve had a few conversations, we didn’t think too hard about our solution for Mother’s Day for two moms until I got the assignment to write this. So we’ve thought it through, and here’s where we’ve landed:

• We want to celebrate when the world is full of messages about motherhood and the shelves are full of Mother’s Day cards. We both identify as women and moms, so we want to be part of the universal festivities.
• Turn the day into a weekend. We initially thought, “Great—we’ll each take a day.” But what about our extended families? We want our boys to know Mother’s Day is about celebrating all the moms and mom-figures in our lives. So we’ll take Saturday for us and make Sunday about everyone.
• It should feel like more than just any other dream Saturday. Special activities and traditions will help make this weekend intentional and special.
• Make it memorable. We’ll find something our boys will genuinely look forward to—and come home for—as they get older.
• Take some time off. For at least part of the weekend, we hope to relax and revel in what we love doing.

Right now, we’re thinking we’ll do something special at the beginning and end of the day, with fun activities in the middle. (Having an infant means limiting activities and destinations and planning them around naps and feeding—for now.)

This is probably the first Mother’s Day our toddler will remember. He already gets that having two moms is a special thing: He even made up “Mooms” as his own plural for us. So for us, Mooms’ Day Weekend might begin like this:

• Start Saturday with a big family breakfast.
• Head to a giant plant nursery with an on-site coffee shop.
• Play outside. (Cady built me a bench in our backyard garden last spring so I could have a comfy place to sit. So she’ll probably plant some new veggies with our toddler while I chill with our baby.)
• Magically, both the kids take a nap at the same time.
• For dinner, we’ll order something freaking delicious so the Mooms don’t have to cook or do dishes. It will definitely involve cheesecake.

Of course, we’ll find cards that say how we feel about each other and add heartfelt handwritten messages. (And yes—Hallmark makes Mother’s Day cards for two moms.) We know our toddler will be encouraged to make two Mother’s Day cards at school.

For Mother’s Day gifts, we generally do “upgrades” of something we already have and use a lot. Those dinky mittens you wear excessively? I’m gonna upgrade ya to a fancy, bougie pair. That broken comb you use ’cause you don’t have another? Here’s a new, handcrafted one. (That, or jewellery—jewellery is always the all-star fallback.)