To the One Who has a Complicated Relationship to Their Mother

Dear friend,

There are some letters that don’t begin with ease.

This is one of them.

Because this one is for you—the one who feels tangled on Mother’s Day. The one who scrolls past the posts and doesn’t know what to feel. The one who holds both ache and reverence. Love and distance. Gratitude and grief.

This is for the one whose relationship with their mother cannot be summed up in a bouquet, a brunch, or a picture-perfect caption.

This is for the one who carries silence between phone calls. Or boundaries that had to be built out of necessity, not spite. The one who longs for a connection that never fully came. Or who had it once—and lost it. Or who never knew it at all.

And still—you are here. Living. Becoming.

Rebuilding from what was missing.

Or alchemizing what was given.

No matter what your experience, you are here because someone came before you.

Someone’s body carried the labor of your beginning. And even if you’ve spent your entire life untangling what that beginning cost you—the thread of your existence still carries strength, still carries ancestry, still carries possibility.

You may not celebrate Mother’s Day at all. And that’s absolutely okay. Or you may feel the pressure to perform a feeling you don’t have, or bury one you do. Yet hear me now:

You don’t have to betray your truth to honor your humanity.

It is okay to grieve what never was. It is okay to hold love and disappointment in the same breath. It is okay to not call. It is okay to call with your voice shaking. It is okay to mother yourself now.

Maybe you had to become what your mother could not be. Maybe you’ve spent your life learning how to give what you never received. That doesn’t make you broken—it makes you brave.

This day is not just for the cards and the flowers.

It’s for the lineage-breakers. The re-motherers.

The ones who chose tenderness when they were not taught it. The ones who raised themselves out of silence. The ones who found family in other forms. You don’t owe the world a polished version of your pain.

You are allowed to feel what you feel.

You are allowed to release the fantasy and hold the real. You are allowed to keep your boundaries. You are allowed to not elevate specific days on the calendar in your life. You are allowed to love from afar. You are allowed to stop trying to fix what someone else never tried to understand.

And still—You are here. Living. Healing.

Untangling. Reclaiming.

May you be so wildly gentle with yourself this weekend. May you honor what was, release what needs releasing, and nurture what’s growing in its place.

And may you know—you are not alone in this. There is something holy in becoming, even when the roots are tangled. Especially then.

With you in the becoming,

Practice Postscript

The Reflection:

What have I always wanted to hear from my mother—and how can I begin to offer some version of that to myself?

The Everyday Practice:

When big feelings surface around your mother or maternal experience, place one hand over your chest and one over your belly. Breathe. Whisper aloud to yourself, "We’re okay now. We know how to stay with ourselves.”

Living In The Question:

What would it mean to become the mother I needed—without abandoning the person I’ve become?