WILLIAMSVILLE — When I was a little girl in the middle of the last century, I celebrated Mother's Day by bringing my mother breakfast in bed and giving her a homemade greeting card with a tissue-paper flower drenched in her good perfume.
Mom would dutifully eat the cold cereal, which she didn't really care for, and she accepted the reeking card graciously, despite regret for my copious use of Chanel No. 5.
It was all part of a charade we were programmed to play out: my mother enduring an unpleasant meal and me learning how to glorify motherhood, so that I'd grow up and want to be a mom.
I came of age during an era of unprecedented sexual freedom - a time when effective birth control was easily available, legal abortions accessible, and sexually transmitted diseases fairly benign and treatable.
With Our Bodies, Ourselves as our guidebook to sexual liberty, my cohort behaved as if we had already achieved equality with men, just as we believed we would see the Equal Rights Amendment pass, guaranteeing women equal treatment under the law.
After all, women comprise more than half the population and do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the ultimate volunteer job in the world: raising kids.
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The Equal Rights Amendment didn't pass, and “feminism” became a dirty word in the backlash that has only gained momentum, as evident by the current denigration of women's sexuality now being played out in the political arena.
Just recently, women were first shut out of a congressional hearing on women's health care and then vilified in the national media for speaking out.
Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University, testified about the unintended consequences when institutions limit access to health care on religious grounds. According to Fluke, a friend of hers could not afford the birth-control pills prescribed not as contraception but to treat polycystic ovary syndrome, a medical condition that, left untreated, could lead to infertility.
The irony here is palpable: By following the Catholic Church's prohibition against birth-control pills and denying coverage for a medically approved treatment, this young woman will probably never be able to bear children. And for speaking up, Sandra Fluke was pilloried in the right-wing media.
Requiring health insurance policies to cover all women's health options puts individual freedom ahead of institutional freedom, which only makes sense.
The Constitution protects an individual's right to practice one's religion; it does not protect a church's right to impose belief on its communicants. The rule in the Affordable Care Act requiring employers of all stripes to cover all aspects of women's health care protects individual freedom, not institutional hegemony.
But there are those who want the state to control female fertility, regardless.
In ongoing attempts to limit women's access to the full spectrum of legal health care treatments, several state legislatures have considered bills that place yet more hurdles in the way of a woman's access to a safe, legal abortion.
Ironically, it is most often the same politicians who clamor for less government intrusion in our private lives who support these political barriers to a woman's privacy and access to health care in this most intimate of matters.
In a welcome reversal to these misogynist efforts, several politicians have turned the tables to help illustrate how obnoxious and obstructionist they are by proposing similar limits to men's access to health care.
In Ohio, Virginia, and Illinois, lawmakers have proposed a variety of hoops that men seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction would have to jump through before they could be prescribed medication for the condition.
These restrictions include that men seeking such medicine undergo a rectal exam, be tested for heart problems, and receive counseling about pursuing celibacy as a viable lifestyle.
In Missouri, a state representative proposed a bill that would limit vasectomies only in instances where the man's life depended on it.
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I've been very lucky: I had three planned pregnancies with healthy outcomes. I've been blessed by motherhood, which hadn't been in my original game plan. I wasn't going to marry and have children, but I met a man who convinced me to change my mind.
Even with his support, motherhood is harder than I ever imagined, starting with the exhaustion of pregnancy, followed by the sleeplessness of baby care, the perpetual motion of toddlerhood, the scheduling of school days, and the drama of adolescence. Motherhood is hard.
And yes, motherhood has its rewards. My children have taught me patience, compassion, and love beyond anything I ever imagined; they are my window into the rising generation and my toehold on a future that will continue without me.
It's a future in which I hope the obligatory adulation of motherhood on a single Sunday in May each year is supplanted by real veneration of mothers for the hard, unpaid, unrecognized, patriotic, and important work we do.
I hope my children live to see public policies that support parenting, policies that promote the health, education, and welfare of families, policies that begin with guaranteeing women the right to control if and when they embark on motherhood, this most demanding of human endeavors.
So this Mother's Day, I'm going to pass up on the greeting cards and flowers and hold out for something more.