The Absurdity—And Genius—of the Mother's Day Opt-Out Email

The Atlantic

07-05-2025

Cameo is a platform that allows everyday people to commission B-to-Z-list celebrities to record personalized videograms for any occasion. Some time ago, when my friend Caroline was in the hospital, I used it to buy, for $12.59, a 2-minute, 14-second pep talk for her, delivered by a man who is famous online for dressing like a dog.
More than two years later, Cameo wants me to know that if I would like to not receive Mother's Day–related promotional emails, I can opt out. So does Heyday, the Millennial skin-care company, and Parachute, the Millennial linen store, and Prose, the Millennial shampooery, and at least two different stores that have sold me expensive candles. They offer this service using the whispery timbre and platitudinous vocabulary of therapy-speak: This time of year, I am told, can be 'meaningful' but also 'tender.' I can take care of myself by electing not to receive Mother's Day marketing emails. Very often, there is a JPEG of flowers.
This is well intentioned, of course: This holiday really can be difficult, for any number of reasons. 'The death of a beloved,' C. S. Lewis wrote, 'is an amputation,' and every mother, without exception, eventually dies, leaving lots of people without someone to celebrate. Being a mother and having a mother are also two of the most profound experiences a person can have, and profundity is rarely uncomplicated. Not being a mother if you want to be one can be a sadness you carry in your pocket every day. There are so many ways to wish things were different. Whatever's going on, I can guarantee that no one wants to be reminded of their familial trauma by the company they bought a soft-rib bath bundle (colorway: agave) from five years ago. And so they email us, asking if it's okay to email us.
The practice took off in the United States a few years ago, shortly after the coronavirus pandemic started and George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. Because of social media, people were already used to multinational corporations talking to them like friends, but when the world started falling apart, they wanted those friends to be better —to seem more empathetic, more human, more aware of things other than selling products. Younger customers, especially, 'want to feel like they're in a community with their favorite brands,' the business journalist Dan Frommer told me. 'There's this level of performance that becomes necessary, or at least, you know, part of the shtick.'
The Mother's Day opt-out email suggests that the brand sending it sees you as a whole person, not just as a market segment (at least for a moment). It uses an intimate medium to manufacture more intimacy, appearing between messages from your human loved ones and talking like them too. (A recent email from Vena, a CBD company co-founded by a former Bravo housewife, begins by saluting me as 'babe' and reassures me that if I 'need to push pause for these emails, we totally get that.') It allows the brand to suggest that it is different from all of the other corporations competing for your attention and money—while simultaneously giving them more access to your attention and money.
For companies, sending the Mother's Day opt-out email is like buying insurance on a highly valuable asset: your inbox. 'Email is, probably for every brand, the most profitable marketing channel for e-commerce,' Frommer told me. The people on any given company's email list are likely on it because they've already engaged with the brand in some way, whether knowingly or not. In the argot of online marketing, they're good leads —a consumer relationship just waiting to be strengthened, one strenuously casual email at a time. This is why every start-up is constantly offering you 10 percent off your first purchase if you sign up for their email list, and also why they will do anything to keep you on it. If a Mother's Day opt-out prevents even a small number of people from unsubscribing to all of a brand's emails, it will be worthwhile. 'It's the kind of thing that probably means a lot to very few people,' Frommer said, 'but those people really appreciate it.'
But like a lot of what makes for good business these days, the effect is a little absurd. So many emails about Mother's Day are flying around, all in the service of sending fewer emails about Mother's Day. Advertisements are constantly shooting into our every unoccupied nook and cranny, but the good ones are now sensitive to our rawest family dynamics. Also, not to be too literal about it, but: The idea that pain, or regret, or tenderness, or whatever the brands want to call it, is something a person can decide not to participate in is fiction. 'Everyone is grieving something at any given point in time,' Jaclyn Bradshaw, who runs a small digital-marketing firm in London, told me. (She recently received a Mother's Day email that cannily combined a sale and an opt-out, offering 15 percent off just above the button to unsubscribe.) If someone's grief is acute, an email is unlikely to be the thing that reminds them. 'No, I remember,' Bradshaw said. 'It was at the very forefront of my mind.'
Read: When Mother's Day is 'empowering'
Mother's Day originated as an occasion for expressing simple gratitude for child care and the women who do it; people celebrated by writing letters and wearing white carnations. It is now a festival of acquisition, a day mostly devoted to buying things— $34 billion worth of things this year, according to forecasters. The brunch places in my neighborhood are advertising Mother's Day specials, and the ads on my television are reminding me that it's 'not too late to buy her jewelry.' I'm planning on going to a baseball game that day, and when I get there, a free clutch bag, designed to look like a baseball and 'presented by' a mattress company, will be pressed into my hand, in honor of the concept of motherhood. My friends will post on Instagram, and my co-workers will ask me how my day was when I get to work on Monday.
This doesn't bother me, personally. I love being a mother, almost entirely uncomplicatedly, and I love my mother, almost entirely uncomplicatedly. (In this, I know, I'm very lucky.) I have no particular problem with Mother's Day, which is to say I'm as happy receiving an email from a brand about it as I am receiving an email from a brand about anything.
But every year around this time, I think of my friend Mimi, who died the day after Mother's Day in 2018. That's not fully true, actually—the truth is that I think about her all the time: when I see a dog she would have delighted in petting, or find myself walking behind a woman with wild curly hair like hers on the street, or am served an old photo by my phone's 'memories' feature, or talk to someone who loved her too. Most of the time, I like it. Other times, if you gave me a button I could click to stop being reminded that she's not here anymore, I'd push it until my forefinger broke. It wouldn't work, of course. Brands are some of the most powerful forces in modern life, but they cannot do everything.