Mother’s Day

We just got past Mother’s Day which is a difficult holiday for many of my clients, and friends as well.

Mother’s Day is pushed with great vigor by the commercial forces in our culture, with a reported 33.5  billion dollars spent on Mothers Day gifts and celebration in 2024. The profusion of advertising is unavoidable and can really be a drag for those who aren’t feeling the joy.

It can be quite performative as well. Some of my clients take a social media break for a few days around Mother’s Day, to avoid the pain of all the displays of deliriously happy mothers with their adoring partners and children. There can be so much hurt around what does or doesn’t happen on Mother’s Day.

The “Happy Mother’s Day” spoken to every random woman of child-bearing age, while meant kindly, is its own dilemma. The nice person at the store or on the sidewalk doesn’t know whether that woman is even a mother, or whether she is dealing with any number of painful circumstances around the topic— a mother who is estranged from her children, a woman who has lost a child to death or addiction, a woman who wants to be a mother but isn’t, a woman who has lost her mother and is in deep grieving, a woman who has an incarcerated child, a woman with a painful relationship to her own mother. 

Because of my therapy focus on childhood trauma, neglect and abuse, many of my clients have ambivalent or negative relationships with their own mothers. There’s been a lot of focus on the idea of the “Mother Wound” which you can read a bit about here. 

Folks often feel frustrated with themselves for still feeling sadness, anger and grief about their relationship with their mother when they are way beyond childhood. Even several decades beyond childhood sometimes, even long after that mother has passed on. But it makes sense, because this if for most people the FIRST and most primary relationship that they will ever know. In the most basic sense, mother means literal survival, and beyond that mother means so much about our identity and worth. That primal knowledge stays with us for life, and we can’t just think our way out of it. Healing takes time, and it’s not necessarily ever really over. 

As I state with my other blog post “I’m sorry your mom sucks”, there is no easy way around any of this. If Mother’s Day or other holidays that have family pain associated with them, it’s good to admit that and do whatever it is that helps you get through the day. We often think we “have” to do things that we don’t want to and it’s not always the case! In my practice, I am big fan of what I call “therapeutic lying”, as in “Oh how sad, I was SO looking forward to the family reunion but I had some bad sushi and now have food poisoning. So sad I cannot possible get in the car to come!” If that helps you get through the day without creating conflict but also protecting yourself from unbearable situations, I think that’s ok. 

If you are a mother, it’s ok to ask directly for what you want from significant others. As I am fond of saying to my clients, mind reading is not a thing. Being clear about what we do and do not want is not a guarantee of getting it, sadly, but it is a start. Don’t be afraid to take the space you need, to say no to things that are not healthy for you, and to celebrate yourself as a mother, or child or just a person.