Unlike chocolates and flowers, there's no expiry date on missing your mam 

Now hands up who definitely won't miss the accompanying ads for another year.

Not that it can have escaped your notice, Mothering Sunday is upon us.

If you think the annual avalanche of reminders to treat the most important woman stops when they're pushing up daisies, you'd be wrong.

Afternoon tea, perfume, hampers and handbags are just some of the rather pointless gifting suggestions that have pinged into my inbox in recent weeks.

In an email vaguely entitled 'Treat Your Loved One This Mother's Day', one Irish shoe company even went so far as to acknowledge while your actual mother might be six-feet under, that's no excuse not to spoil "a big sister, an aunt, a granny or a close friend" this Hallmark holiday - the dictionary definition of 'urgh'.

It makes me wonder if motherless sons and daughters won't soon also be targeted by drug companies on the day of celebration, when even years-old grief can bubble to the surface, after 'prolonged grief' was controversially recognised as a mental disorder last week.

The inclusion of the condition - applied to those incapacitated by their loss after a year - in psychiatry bible DSM-5 - on the one hand will force insurance companies to stump up for treatment.

On the other, it risks medicalising, for example, the sadness that many will naturally feel on occasions like today, whether they lost their mother one week, one year or a whole lifetime ago.

Stateside, naltrexone - a drug used for addiction - is already in clinical trials for grief therapy.

More than a week after news of the classification, I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about that.

But you don't need a PhD to know that if you're heartsore for the woman who brought you into the world this Sunday, or the woman who might as well have, there's probably nothing wrong with you.

Whatever about adult children mourning their mams, it's mams mourning their children it must be hardest for.

And who would dare say that Rebecca Saunders' longing for her daughter, Clarissa, after almost a decade is anything other than completely normal?

The American woman this week got the most bittersweet Mother's Day present when permission to exhume the remains of her three-year-old child - buried, in the fog of grief, with the father who drowned her in West Cork in 2013 - for burial in her native Texas was granted.

Posting on her 'Clarissa's Cause' Twitter account on Tuesday, she said: "After nine years I will be able to take Rissa home! This has been a really long time coming. It's a day for celebration."

Personally, I don't go in for the whole 'Happy heavenly birthday or Mother's Day' thing (though each to their own), but I hope anyone lighting a candle or visiting a grave today, remembers to treat themselves with kindness, too.

Because, unlike the chocolates and flowers that will still be in the supermarkets tomorrow, there is no expiration date on missing your mam.

• This whole ‘cut-out’ fashion trend is the greatest swizz going, if you ask me. You have designers saving a fortune on material while convincing women to splurge on the hottest style of 2022.

That said, if I looked as good in the scary craze as singer Halsey at Tuesday’s iHeartRadio Music Awards, I’d be having a go with the scissors myself.

• Little Red Riding Hood can breathe a sigh of relief after Kylie Jenner’s baby name this week. The reality star welcomed her second child, a son named Wolf, with rapper Travis Scott last month.

But, on Monday, she said that the baby is named after the carnivore no more, explaining to fans on Instagram: “We just really didn’t feel like it was him.”

In fairness, it’s a bit much to expect him to howl at the moon and gnaw on raw meat at six weeks old.

• 'There’s a place for her, somewhere a place for her’, bosses were left singing after magically finding a seat at the Oscars for West Side Story star Rachel Zegler.

Fans were up in arms this week after it emerged that the young star of Steven Spielberg’s Best Picture nominee hadn’t even been invited to tonight’s awards ceremony in Los Angeles. Going one better, the 20-year-old will now reportedly also be present at the celeb-studded bash after The Academy was embarrassingly forced to reshuffle the seating plan at the eleventh hour.

Just putting it out there, my VIP Electric Picnic invite hasn’t arrived yet either.