Mary McNamara: This Mother’s Day, forget the cards and flowers. Women want their rights instead

When I was young, my father gave me one piece of advice about choosing a career: Stay away from any occupation with a national “appreciation” day.

As a public high school teacher, he believed that those days were a performative substitute for fair wages and social respect.

So what, by that logic, are we to make of Mother’s Day?

I’ve been a mother for 27 years, and was the child of a living mother for 40, so I appreciate the importance of a culturally enforced day in which motherhood is celebrated with breakfast in bed or tea in some fancy garden, with cards and gifts and floral