Mothers’ Day is one of those days that it is easy to warm to and turn away from at the same time.

I adore my own mother and treasure every moment with her. But I don’t need there to be a Mothers’ Day to thank her for the immeasurable meaning she has given to my life. I am delighted to spend time with her on Mothers’ Day, but I am equally delighted to see her every other week of the year too.

As a mother myself, I don’t want my own daughter to feel pressured by commercially driven sickly ads imploring her to ‘make your Mum feel special’ by buying some outrageously priced item that panders to the idea that women belong in the kitchen or the bedroom. Seriously, just how many advertisements for frilly nighties and new saucepans can one handle?

I am also skeptical that the veneration of motherhood is also a thinly veiled disguise for a silent contempt and deep suspicion of women who don’t have children. Women like our own Prime Minister, who attracts enormous vitriol, which is apparently accepted because she is childless. I don’t like that the celebration of Mothers’ Day comes at the expense of dividing the sisterhood.

And while I love being a mother, I don’t necessarily love the pedestal that comes with it; a pedestal that sits on a shaky foundation and is poised ready to topple at the slightest bump. Because motherhood on a pedestal is about motherhood as some kind of perfection, and that is setting oneself up for failure.

It is also setting an impossible standard by which women judge themselves as never good enough. We torture ourselves about being stay-at-home or working mothers, and then try to do both. We pressure ourselves to have clean houses, home-cooked meals and perfectly ironed shirts. We can’t let ourselves go but are forbidden from any form of self-indulgence too. We are supposed to nurture children and partners but also have to make time to cover our grey hairs and wax our legs. Hey, there’s an image of motherhood to uphold!

And while we tread an ever-narrowing line about what we “should” be, we feel like failures 90% of the time for being too much or too little of something. We know too that the only thing worse that being childless for a woman is to be a ‘BAD MOTHER’ so we continue walking that diminishing line and judge others and ourselves far too harshly.

So this Mothers’ Day will be about the simple joys of sharing time and conversation with people. No restaurant meal. Nothing fancy. A gift? Maybe a book or two. Nothing perfect. Just as it should be.