The Mother's Day No One Makes Cards For

When the relationship has been taken from you

Some parents wait for a message that doesn’t come. Not because their child doesn’t exist, not because there has been a falling out they can point to, but because something has happened, slowly and deliberately, to the space between them. The child has been shaped, by the other parent, by circumstance, by ideology, by years of quiet accumulation, to stay away. In some circles this is termed parental alienation, but in others this is contested. Here, it is about the end result: fractured relationships and loss between a parent and a child, when there was no harm or abuse.

This kind of loss has no clean name. The child is alive. The love is intact. But the relationship is somewhere out of reach, and you are not permitted to grieve it in the ways that loss usually permits.

You learn to hold the day differently. To take what comes, if it comes at all: a late text, a brief call, a small and imperfect gesture, and receive it for what it is rather than measuring it against what it isn’t.

You learn that any shift is worth something. That next year may look different again. That the door you are holding open is an act of love, even when no one is walking through it. It is a particular kind of torment, to love someone you cannot reach. It is also, quietly, a particular kind of faithfulness. If you are, or were the child, then you have your own questions and feelings to carry. It was not your fault that you were made to choose. This is often implicit, and build up over time - not an informed choice, even if at some point you might have said it was. This does not apply to relationships where there has been harm (estrangement - below).

When the relationship has broken down

Estrangement is different. Sometimes it arrives with a conversation; more often it arrives as a gradual fading, a series of unreturned messages, a Christmas that passes without contact and then another. Sometimes it is your choice. Sometimes it is theirs. Sometimes it is nobody’s choice exactly, just the accumulated weight of things that were never resolved.

Either way, a day dedicated to the relationship sits differently when the relationship is broken. There is grief in it. Sometimes relief. Sometimes both at once, which is its own particular difficulty.

For adult children who have stepped back from a parent, for their own safety, their own sanity, their own survival, Mother’s Day can arrive like an accusation. The world is full of flowers and gratitude and soft-focus celebration, and you are sitting with something far more complicated: love that is also fear, or obligation that was never freely given, or grief for the parent you needed and did not have.

That is not ingratitude. That is honesty and for some, it deserves to be held with the same tenderness as any other form of grief.

When the person is gone

The bereaved know this day in their own way. The first one without her is unsurvivable until it is survived. The tenth one catches you off guard because you thought by now it would hurt less.

Grief does not follow a schedule. It does not respect the expectation that you should be better by now, or that time heals, or that the love somehow diminishes into something more manageable. Sometimes it grows. Sometimes it changes shape. Sometimes it ambushes you in a supermarket in mid-March because the flowers are out and she would have liked those ones.

There is nothing to fix in this. There is only the living of it, and the allowing of it, and, on the hard days, the permission to step away from the celebration entirely and be somewhere quieter, where the loss can be what it is.

When the relationship was never simple

Not every mother was the mother her child needed. Not every childhood was safe. Some people arrive at this day carrying a love that is also a wound, wanting to honour someone who hurt them, or trying to make peace with the fact that they cannot, or somewhere in between.

This is perhaps the least spoken-about version of the day, because it sits so far outside the cultural script. We are told, repeatedly and from childhood, what this day should feel like. The gap between that and the reality of what some people actually lived can be enormous.

If you grew up with a parent who was absent, or harmful, or simply unable to give what you needed, you are allowed to feel whatever you feel today. The ambivalence is not a failure of love. It is the honest shape of a complicated one.

When you are the parent of a child who is struggling

Some mothers today are thinking not of their own childhood but of their children. A child in the grip of addiction. A child whose mental health has taken them somewhere unreachable. A child who is estranged by their own pain and cannot find their way back. A child who is in prison, or in hospital, or simply somewhere out of contact.

Maternal love in these circumstances is not soft-focus. It is relentless and often anguished and sometimes indistinguishable from grief. It does not go away. It cannot be reasoned with or managed or set aside for a day.

To love a child you cannot help, or cannot reach, or cannot protect from themselves, can feel like a heavy weight on the soul. It is carried largely invisibly, because it does not fit the story we tell about what motherhood looks like.

When the day simply doesn’t fit

For those who wanted children and could not have them, this day arrives like a small annual wound. For those who chose not to have children and find themselves navigating a world that assumes they must regret it, the day can carry its own particular friction. For those who have lost a child, to stillbirth, to illness, to accident, or adoption or to any of the ways children can be lost, the day is held in a way most people around them cannot see.

There is no hierarchy of difficulty here. The day touches people in as many ways as there are people. The version that looks ordinary from the outside is not always ordinary on the inside.

What I know, from both the professional and the human parts of my life, is that commemorative days have a particular power to surface what we carry. They do not create the grief or the complexity, they simply illuminate it, the way a certain light reveals things that were always there.

If today is hard, that is information in itself. It is pointing at something real: a love, a loss, a longing, a wound, that deserves to be taken seriously rather than pushed away. You do not have to perform the version of the day that the world is expecting. You are allowed to feel exactly what you feel.

If what you feel today is something you’d like to bring into a room and look at more carefully, with someone who won’t flinch, I’m here to listen.