Sorry, Mum. By the time I caught up with “Mother’s Day with Carole Middleton”, it was too late to plan a festive brunch, working to a rose gold colour palette, where we would celebrate “being thankful for motherhood and all the things the amazing women in your life do every single day”.

Likewise, I refuse to see it as a commentary on my own attempts at mothering that my daughter will not, as Carole proposes, be transforming the dining table (NB, it’s not too late!) “into an Instagram-worthy setting with an abundance of spring flowers and foliage, an oversized balloon, a decorative table cloth and runner, and tea lights”. At least we’ll be able to sit together, mother and daughter, lovingly picturing the scene in Kensington Palace. At this moment, the Duchess of Cambridge reclines beneath a bespoke banner from Party Pieces, inscribed with “We love you, Mum”, while George approaches with one of their rose gold “Love” balloons.

And suddenly, incidentally, it’s clear where the younger Middleton daughter, Pippa, acquired the entertaining expertise that once won her a £400,000 advance from Penguin books. “Paper plates,” Carole writes, “make a great alternative to breakable china if you’re hosting younger guests”. Anyone with non-breakable china should proceed as planned.

For those, however, who messed up the brunch gathering, my Mother’s Day tip would be for an outing to see, or re-see, I, Tonya. Or failing that, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Or, failing that, Lady Bird. The first on the list is especially recommended as a bonding event for mothers with an accompanying older child, given (multiple spoilers ahead) the very low chance that you will have ever been amazing enough to hurl a knife at your teen – as Tonya Harding’s mother, LaVona, is alleged to have done – and with such accuracy that it embedded itself in junior’s arm. In the event that there was occasional bloodshed, the youngster will appreciate that you never shrugged, like flinty LaVona: “Oh, please, show me a family that doesn’t have ups and downs.”

It must be a rare mother who does not come out of I, Tonya feeling, well, all things considered, it could have gone worse. We’re not ideal; we’re not up there with Gary Oldman’s mum, cited at the Oscars for her exemplary contribution to future Churchill impersonations, but at least we didn’t make our unfortunate daughters wet themselves on a public ice rink. Then again, our daughters can’t do triple axels.

As for children who approach this Mother’s Day with a lengthy charge-sheet, ask yourselves: as unsatisfactory, and non-amazing as she was, did your mother ever, like Frances McDormand’s character in Three Billboards, kick your schoolfriends in the crotch? Did she insult the vicar? Shout that she hoped you’d get raped? Or deform your entire character, like the wicked, pickled racist, old Mrs Dixon, in the same film? Then you’re already ahead.

Thanks Mum, on this special day, for never setting fire to a police station. There’s another point in it for Mum if she never, like the mother in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, fat-shamed you in a dress shop.

The arresting rejection of social norms by older female characters, in these recent films, has elicited a cathartic audience response whose intensity surely derives from the characters being, technically, nurturers. From whom better things are expected. For stepmothers, adoptive ones, or single women without children (“spinsters”, as the Daily Mail still likes to call them), Hollywood has always devised LaVona-like manifestations of bitterness, weirdness or lip-pursing, a tradition to which Lesley Manville’s neat tyrant in Phantom Thread is just the latest, cherishable, addition.

But where screen mothers are concerned, madness or some hopeless, hippyish, semi-disarming version of maternal inadequacy have generally been the maximum on offer to real-life nurturers seeking reassuringly dreadful comparators. Donald Winnicott’s fallible “good enough mother” was never likely to catch on, outside therapeutic circles, given the commercial energy promoting aproned paragons, with their enduring appeal to male beneficiaries of the status quo. Of all the gendered expectations inculcated in little girls, has any been as precious, in protecting male dominance, as the fallacy that child rearing is as reverenced in reality as it so often is on screen? Just in time for Mother’s Day, a study reported that parents of “boomerang” children perceive their refilled nests as a decline in “feelings of control, autonomy, pleasure and self-realisation in everyday life”.

For some mothers, such as the Conservative Andrea Leadsom, or Labour’s Sarah Champion, the suggestion, cinematic and otherwise, that motherhood can be less than perfect will be yet more inconvenient. Is it possible that regular childbearing is not, after all, equivalent to an MA in political compassion and foresight? What childless Theresa May lacked, Leadsom argued, speaking “as a mum”, was her own, biologically superior, “very real stake in the future of our country”. She had, presumably with that in mind, voted Brexit. More recently, Champion disparagingly contrasted stakeless May’s policy on child abuse with her predecessor’s: “David Cameron got it and I think he got it because I went to him as a dad rather than going to him as a politician.”

In their way, in fact, mums Leadsom and Champion join Alison Janney’s superb LaVona in demonstrating that motherhood is no guarantee of emotional health and may even be compatible with astonishingly insulting behaviour – in their case, to the one in five women who will not have a child. To say nothing of the glaring omission of what everybody knows: that a job and motherhood remains, for many women, a combination as gruelling, as it can be, with luck, fulfilling – and one unlikely to get any easier while prominent mothers rehearse pieties about its sacrificial specialness.

• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist