When your Mother’s Day doesn’t fit a card…
My Instagram post sparked a huge dm response when I shared it the night before the Mother’s Day avalanche of Hallmark celebration posts.
Mother’s Day hurts when you’re trying to conceive, month after month. A couple or more years from the wedding. Doing everything right and still waiting for a positive test after an interminable two-week-wait, the reality of a growing pregnancy, a 16-week scan, your baby finally in your arms.
Mother’s Day hurts when you’re pregnant, anxiously counting days until a next scan, fearing every twinge and visit to the loo in case there’s blood.
Mother’s Day hurts when you don’t even try to explain you are a mother of one, two or many more – but that your babies did not live to be born? Or if you are raw and bleeding after a cruel and recent miscarriage?
Mother’s Day hurts when you are broken and bleeding, cradling your newborn baby. Exhausted, bewildered and betrayed by a birthing nightmare they didn’t warn you about, and guilty you don’t feel and look the way ‘proper’ new mothers do.
Mother’s Day hurts when know consuming heartful love, watching your child grow so quickly and yearning for another who may not come.
Mother’s Day hurts when you grieve your own beloved mother who left you too soon or is so recently gone you turn to smile at her. Maybe the grief is for the mother you did have, and the one you really deserved. Or the other women that did mother you.
Mother’s Day hurts when you love and care for the children of your partner as step-mother. And all that goes with it. Afraid you’ll never feel that bond they have. Waiting on the outside for your IVF success, stretching the pennies to meet the costs.
Mother’s Day hurts like hell when your adored child has died, and your other adored child grieves her big sister who’ll never be an aunt to her precious little girl.
Mother’s Day hurts when you’re an empty nester. The intensity and exhaustion of the ‘busy years’ all done. Grown up and gone, the privilege of having mothered them to maturity, to let them fly free. An aching void of loss which you laugh off and chide yourself for. So far away different lives now, so fleeting the high of visits and then so very deep those lows of airport partings.
How often in my practice do I hear women tell me how they ought to feel, their expectations of how the day will pan out?
And equally they full of judgement and guilt about that they don’t feel better or different.
You do not have to obliterate sadness and grief even if you have had a child after failed IVF or pregnancy loss. It in no way detracts from your love and gratitude. By the same token, finding an ease of pain and hurt, some real joy does not mean denial of a much wanted and always loved baby. Feel, acknowledge and validate your feelings and your experience.
Go easy on yourself when you feel tired by it all. Feelings don’t go away, they get internalised, generating anxiety and eroding mental health.
Not every Mother’s Day is the same. You can make of it what you choose. What works for you this year, may be not fit next year.
I hear you, I understand what it’s like, and I help with healing grief
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