Jonathan Alpert

Mother’s Day is on Sunday. For many, this is a celebratory time to honor the woman who gave us life with flowers, a nice brunch, and a goopy, sentimental card telling Mom how much you adore her.

But as actress Jodie Foster proved last night in her appearance on Late Show with David Letterman to promote her movie The Beaver, relations with Mom are not always simple and joyous.

In a revealing interview, Foster regaled Letterman with tales of her mother’s “mostly negative influence,” including how her mother would repeatedly warn the successful actress and Oscar winner that her career was in a “downward spiral.”

“She liked to tell me all the bad things that were going to happen,” says Foster, who laughs edgily through her recounting. “She’d say, ‘By the time you’re 17 your career will be over.’ ”

At 17, Foster’s career was just beginning. She would follow such iconic childhood turns in films like Taxi Driver, Freaky Friday, and Bugsy Malone with adult performances in hit movies like The Accused (for which she won an Oscar) and Silence of the Lambs (for which she won another Oscar). But none of this stopped Mom from piling on the portends of doom.

After Foster appeared in her 1994 movie Nell, her mother, according to Foster, griped, “ I don’t know what was wrong with the color of your hair, but you will never work again.”

While Foster seems to have accepted her now elderly mother’s constant criticisms with some degree of equanimity, it was telling that when Letterman asked Foster, who has two sons, whether it is better to raise boys or girls, she immediately answered, “Boys, for sure!” Perhaps Foster has no desire to relive fraught mother-daughter dynamics.

So what to do when Mother’s Day is just around the corner and your relationship with Mom is less than utopian?

“To do the traditional stuff is to buy into societal-fueled beliefs and the commercialization of a holiday,” says psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert. “Screw tradition. Tailor the holiday to your circumstances and make it unique to your relationship with your Mom. Don’t feel you have to do something just because everyone else is. Try a funny card, a trip to the nail salon, or a walk in the park.”

So I guess a DVD of Psycho is out of the question?

“Suck it up and put aside your needs for one day,” finger-wags Alpert.

But if all else fails, try buying Mom a therapy session. Says Alpert: “Mother and daughter specials are all the rage.”