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A s Mother’s Day approaches, I have to say I haven’t really been paying attention. I’ve thought a couple of times about needing to get a card for my mother and mother-in-law, and maybe a book for my mom. But it’s been brought to my attention that I will be a mother myself in about six weeks' time and that this day might have some particular relevance to me.

In thinking about what Mother’s Day means to me I’ve realized I don’t know. But it’s got me thinking about what being a mother means to me. And that’s really complicated.

A therapist once told a friend of mine that a large percentage of her short-term clients were women motivated to go see her because they were suffering what amounted to an identity crisis around becoming a wife and, even more commonly, a mother. I’m not surprised. “Mother” is one of the most loaded terms I know.

When I think about being a “mother,” I think about “good” mothers and “bad” mothers, and how being a “good” mother implies to me, among other things, an insane amount of knowledge.

For instance, knowing how to stop a baby from crying (or stopping yourself from throwing it out the window when it won’t stop crying after six hours non-stop); how to sew curtains; how to tell when your kids are lying to you; how to tell when meat is cooked without hacking into it six times and putting it back in the oven, saying “just a few more minutes this time, I’m sure!”; how to gracefully deal with a preschooler’s loud-voiced query in a crowded public place as to “why does that lady have a mustache?”; how to speak with your kid’s teacher when you’re sure your kid is being bullied but won’t admit it to you; how to ensure your kids are eating enough vegetables; how to shut off the water in the house to stop the toilet from flooding when you’ve broken off the toilet shut-off tap; how to explain to a three-year-old what death is; how to get gum out of hair or candle wax out of fabric; how to cope when it’s 4 am and your 16-year-old isn’t home yet; how to correctly install and use an infant car seat, rectal thermometer and porn-blocking software; and a million other things, most of which I’m sure I haven’t even thought of yet but that will require instant and specialized knowledge.

Okay, so at least one of these things I already know (we’ve dealt with several plumbing issues in our two years in this house) and some I won’t need to know for a few years yet, and rectal thermometers are not recommended anymore, but I still feel like I’m in one of those dreams where you suddenly realize that you have a final exam in a class you didn’t know you were signed up for and didn’t attend all year – except motherhood is a 24/7/365 final exam in about a million and one subjects, where grades are constantly awarded based on public opinion, ridiculous expectations and unwarranted personal guilt. Everyone’s thought to themselves at one time or other “what a bad mother!” about someone they’ve seen at the grocery store with a screaming toddler who’s destroying the place and a cart full of pop.

This doesn’t seem to be the way for fathers. And while I’m sure many dads have worries about whether or not they will be a good father, the publicly held standards don’t seem to be as high. When it comes to being a good dad, attendance seems to count for a lot. A dad in the grocery store with the same screaming toddler and cart full of pop gets points for just doing the shopping and returning with the same number of kids he started out with, plus any groceries are a bonus.

I guess it’s partly that our expectations for mothers and fathers still conform to specific gender stereotypes about “bread-winners” and “home-makers,” and haven’t caught up to the reality that most parents I know are doing both of these tasks, but mothers aren’t getting enough credit for their part of the “bread-winning” and getting some slack on the child-rearing and home-making part. And statistically speaking, there’s still a gap when it comes to dads getting some slack on the bread-winning expectations and taking over some of the child-rearing ones.

I suspect that “being a mother” is something I’ll be figuring out for a long time. And that my free time for that kind of personal reflection may be limited in the next 20 or so years. Maybe that’s why we have “Mother’s Day”: so Hallmark can come up with heart-wrenching poems that explain it since it’s too complicated to think about and we don’t have time.