My Mother’s Day this year was surprisingly and unexpectedly peaceful. I think I felt a lot of my more turbulent emotions last weekend during Bereaved Mother’s Day, a holiday that sometimes seems to be only known and recognized by the bereaved parents that it is supposed to be honoring. It is a holiday that is supposed to shed light on our grief as bereaved parents, but it seems to exist in the shadows alongside our losses. For me, this year, that thought in particular saddened me. It also highlighted the superficiality of Mother’s Day; bereaved mothers are also mothers, and it seems to me to be more evidence that Mother’s Day only honors the parts of motherhood that our society is comfortable embracing.
I am grateful to still be completely off of social media, which continues to provide my battered heart with an additional layer of necessary protection during each anniversary and holiday. For me, the positives of departing social media continue to far outweigh the negatives.
Feeling those emotions on Bereaved Mother’s Day last week helped me to embrace the aspects of Mother’s Day today that are routinely celebrated by parents of living children. I was able to spend the day with my family, including my living child, and experience gratitude for our health and lives. As a bereaved mother, I know that nothing in this life is guaranteed, and this year I chose to focus on that gratitude as much as I could.
I miss my daughter, and I always will. And even on the days that caring for my living child proves utterly exhausting, I feel a steady undercurrent of profound gratitude for this time we have been given together. I don’t know what the future holds, and that scares me, even more than it used to prior to losing her. Especially when my grief surges forward, I do my best to focus on the here and now, a strategy that has helped to carry me through some difficult times in the past. Here and now, I am doing ok. I’m not sure how I’ll be doing a day from now, or an hour from now, or sometimes even a minute from now. But right now, I’m doing ok.
I know now that Mother’s Day is complicated for many people, for many different reasons. And I am taking this quiet time, this writing time, to reflect on those reasons, and to hold space in my heart for the complexity of what motherhood, in all of its beautiful, loving, and heartbreaking forms, actually means.
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