Coming to Terms With Mother's Day

Mother’s Day is never a good day for me. The week leading up to it always feels ugly, heavy, dark. My mother is alive. She lives not too far from me now but the relationship is still strained. Our communication isn’t very frequent and I can count on one hand how many times we have seen each other or embraced in the last 10 years.

When I was a young girl I used to blame my mother for everything. The abandonment was pungent on me. You could tell that I was missing something. It lingered and stained. I found myself angry, sad, confused, and a myriad of other emotions I haven’t spoken out loud yet. I carried the pain with me and used it as fuel to be better and greater…that was all cosmetic.

Now that I am approaching 30 and I have been consistently catering to my mental health with therapy and spiritual practices I have been able to have some hard conversations with the maternal figures in my life. I wanted to know who we are and what pain we carry. I needed to know in order for me to continue to heal my mother-wound.

The women in my family have suffered immensely, in my opinion, when it comes to a lack of maternal love and care. There was a breakdown of how to be a mother, something I have not experienced. The distanced type of parenting, untreated mental health issues, and emotional unavailability may be a key factor in the breakdown of the relationship I have with my own mother.

I was afraid to speak it. I was afraid they would be ashamed. I was afraid it would bring further humiliation to my family. Motherhood, from where I stand, is something we struggle with within my family. Not every woman in my family is an absent and emotionally unavailable mother but it’s there.

I often wonder how I can fix it. I am a solution-based person so being able to heal and fix things within myself is how I process. Not being able to fix my own mother or erase decades of trauma is nauseating at times. I want to be able to heal my entire maternal lineage. I want to be able to rewrite our story but I do not want children.

How can I speak about motherhood if I am not one? How can I speak about the maternal trauma that stems from my great-grandmother? How can I prepare those that come after me to not love the way the others have loved? To listen? To not abandon? To not abuse? If I do not want children.

I feel foolish trying to fix this most times. I feel like I don’t have the grounds to speak because I am not a mother. I feel like I don’t have the proper chair to sit at the table and talk about the mother-wound in a way that SPEAKS the actions of neglectful mothers. I was very much so neglected. I was very much so abused. I was very much so born to a mother who was not and is still not able to show up for me in the ways I need. But does that give me a seat? Does that give me the ability to say “these things matter when it comes to being a mother?”.

My mother is a woman just like me. I have to remind myself of this constantly. She is flawed, just like me. She is heartbroken by a lack of relationship with her own mother, just like me.

So who am I? I am the daughter of Kimberly, grand-daughter of Barbara Ann, great-granddaughter of Margaret and Callie. I carry the trauma of the women in my family. I am working to heal these things. Being a motherless child when your mother is alive yet painfully absent is a grieving process that can feel never-ending.

Every year I have to come to terms with this. Every Mother’s Day I am painfully reminded that my inner healing work isn’t done. I turn into that little 9-year-old girl sobbing loudly wondering where my Mother was. I am still trying to heal her.