Dear Moms (and the Children Still Longing to Be Mothered),
Mother’s Day was last weekend and it always has me in my feelings. There’s something about this time of year that’s not just tender but leaves me feeling the walls that I have surrounding my relationship with my mom and the one I have with my kids. May always stirs something deeper in me and if it does the same for you…
I just want to say—I see you.
To the moms running on caffeine and sheer will, holding your households together with spreadsheets and bedtime stories… I see the way your heart never fully rests. How you carry everyone’s needs before your own. How you silently calculate emotional temperature checks while folding laundry or driving to practice. The work you do? It’s quiet. It’s sacred. And too often, it goes unnoticed.
But this letter isn’t just for the moms who are doing it all.
This is also for the women like me—the ones who are mothering while still healing from their own complicated relationships with their mothers.
I want to tell you something I don’t say out loud often: Mother’s Day is hard.
It’s not just the absence of acknowledgment that stings. It’s the ache of still wanting it. Still hoping that maybe this year, she’ll see you. Hear you. Apologize. Be proud. Choose you. Not out of duty or image, but because she wants to.
My relationship with my mother has always been a little… off-center. I’ve spent more time than I care to admit trying to earn her love in ways she may never be able to give. Chasing a kind of attention that always felt just out of reach. Trying to fix something I didn’t break. And when you’re mothering from that place, trying to give what you never got, it changes you.
You become the cycle breaker.
You double back to check for bruises you can’t see.
You overcompensate, overthink, over-give.
You rewrite stories mid-sentence because you know what the old version sounded like.
But in doing all that, you forget: you’re allowed to grieve what you didn’t get. Even if she’s still alive. Even if she did her best. Even if people think she’s wonderful. You’re allowed to say: that wasn’t enough for me.
You’re allowed to mother yourself, too.
So this year, while everyone else is posting brunch selfies and writing long captions about “the most amazing mom ever,” I want to talk to you.
You who mother in the shadows.
You who show up even when you weren’t shown how.
You who love from a place of scarcity and still give generously.
You who carry quiet heartbreak and loud resilience in the same breath.
Let this be your permission slip to feel everything. The joy, the resentment, the gratitude, the sadness, the pride, the ache.
Do something for yourself this week. Not because you earned it. Not because you checked off everything on your to-do list. But because you’re worthy of tenderness. Of softness. Of rest. Of being seen.
And if no one tells you this on Sunday, let me say it now:
You are doing beautifully.
You are not invisible.
You are not broken.
You are so deeply loved.
With love,
Wanda
