This Mother’s Day, I’m choosing my friends instead

‘My maternal surrogates have brought a wisdom and depth to our friendship that were hard to find elsewhere.’ Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

I logged into my social media feed on a cold, midwestern spring morning and was greeted with a post by a major magazine. It was a link to 30 Mother’s Day songs that, the article claimed, “will tug at her heart strings”.

Being a daughter who has, despite supreme effort, only managed to tug at her own mother’s heart strings in all the wrong ways, I decided against reading it. The last thing I needed was another gushing reminder of the relationship that evolution and society say I’m supposed to have, but do not.