I Don’t Wanna See Your Hot Mum!

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body"

So it’s nearly Mother’s Day, A.K.A National “Post a Hot Pic of Your Mum” Day. You know the pictures, the ones where she looks like a carbon copy of Rachel from friends, or she has a really good perm, or is wearing the perfect shade of burgundy lipstick. It’s gotta be the right kind of vintage, and she’s gotta be hot! Bonus points if she’s wearing mum jeans before they were even called that at Glassons. It’s a shame she’ll (probably) never see it, because she doesn’t even use Instagram… so why are we even posting it? 

I feel like I’m finally able to articulate what’s been bothering me about the online Sunday Mass where people gather to post pictures of their mums: that on a day that is designed to celebrate the people who literally gave birth to us, we choose to exclusively share pictures of them 10 years before they even became a mum. 

Why do we do this? Why do we want to post young, hot photos of our mothers, in the same way that we (presumably) only want to post young hot photos of ourselves? Is it connected? Are people more likely to see the hotness in you if you show them the hereditary hotness you received from your mum? If you think too long and hard about it (as it goes with literally any concept relating to female beauty), it is upsetting that as a culture, bodies that don’t even exist anymore take precedence over the bodies that brought us into this world.

I am guilty of doing this myself. The instinct to post a cool picture is always breathing down the back of our chronically online necks - and I only questioned my desire to do so last Mother’s Day, after my mum had had a particularly bad year. 

Last May, I found myself scrolling through photos to find the perfect one to post on my story. I’d recently taken a great photo of her at a cafe - she was smiling and wearing a cool outfit, and the lighting was really nice. But every time I look at this photo it makes me cry. During this time she was at one of the very worst points. The effort it took to conjure up the strength to get in the car was enormous, and she was in so much pain while she sipped her coffee, trying so hard to be out in the world. To post that photo felt like a grand disservice to both of us: giving the impression that she was happy while in reality fighting invisible pain would feel like I was discrediting her own experience just as much as the society around her does. Instead, I decided to try and find a younger photo of her to post - a vintage one, a cool one; before I realised that in this way, posting an old picture of her before children, before chronic pain, before everything, would feel like I was shouting from the rooftops, “You were so much better before all those bad things happened to you! Your current body sucks!” And while it does suck, it has kept her alive. To age is a privilege, and to have a body that has carried you through neverending surgeries like my mum’s has is a gift. Why do we want our mums’ bodies to be like blank canvases? 

I didn’t post anything for Mother’s Day that year.

Now that time has passed and she is feeling better, I have returned to my regularly scheduled programming and I truly believe there are plenty of times when posting young photos of your mum can be done well with the right intentions. A comment on this Juulpuppy post defends the Young Mum Pics, saying, “I think it’s more about showing how they were young too. And they aren’t exclusively a mom but their own person,” which is an absolutely stellar point. Posting a throwback with your mum can be exactly the same as posting one with your friends: to visually encapsulate how much time has passed through your relationship, and to tangibly illustrate how close you are. The nostalgia value is large, and seeing what people looked like in their youth is something that I believe is just intrinsically interesting. The difference here is whether or not it is done meaningfully. 

Ask yourself, am I hopping on the bandwagon and posting this because it’s ‘more aesthetic’ than other photos, or does it say something about my mum that I value and love about her? I’ve told myself that moving forward, I won’t post old photos without posting an equal amount of new ones, to avoid inadvertently contributing to the classic Madonna/Whore Complex (where a woman is either cool and sexy, or “wife material,” motherly, and homely - and there is no in between). My mum is hot NOW!! And more importantly than hot, she is alive! And she can play mini golf again! And I’m gonna post it on my Instagram story!! It’s the small things in life! 

A quote by Hunter S. Thompson says:

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

This may involve acquiring a scar, a wrinkle or two, some weight gain, some scratches and some bruises. In a society where our primary motivation to use sunblock is now to avoid looking older rather than to avoid literal cancer, take a moment to be unafraid of ageing. Celebrate your mum and post her current self - when she is gone, you won’t miss the old body of hers that you never knew, you will miss her as she is now: soft.

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who wrote this?

Bryer Oden is a writer based in Wellington, NZ. She loves to use her Master’s in Linguistics and BA in Media Studies to focus on the way we use language online. Her passions are body politics, pop culture, food, and feeling nostalgic about Tumblr in 2014. You can find her being chronically online in the following places: @healthsensation on Instagram & Tiktok for Food recs, Cheap CBD Lunches and Scone Reviews, or Bryer Oden on Substack and Instagram for more writing xxx

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