Moms are sometimes an underappreciated species. We live in their stomachs for nine months, get born, suck on their breasts for a few months, grow up, move out, and then never call to thank them. Mother’s Day is as good an opportunity as any to remember these facts, feel guilty about them and maybe do a little something to alleviate the guilt: a card, perhaps? If one single day a year, however, seems ungenerous when it comes to appreciating the woman who gave you life, regular visits to Postcards from Yo Momma may remind you to be nicer to your mother more often than just on the day that Hallmark tells you to.
The site has gotten a lot of press recently (one of the daughters responsible for it is a former Gawker writer; a book version is slated for the spring of 2009), but the press is not unwarranted. The site is basically a repository of e-mails from mothers to their children, and the collective voice that the letters create captures both that special mother-child relationship, as well as an elusive sense of generation gapage. There is a certain way that mothers of a certain age approach e-mail; they have an endearing strangeness to the way they tend to phrase things via e-mail, as if they are using a language they did not grow up with, but are trying their best to conquer. The important thing to remember, however, is that the language is universal: No matter what she’s writing, all your mother really wants to know is if you’re going to call her on Sunday afternoon like you said you would in your last e-mail.