Mother’s Day Is Complicated, and That’s the Truth Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Mother’s Day has a way of arriving like it owns the room. Flowers in every store, brunch reservations, social media feeds full of tributes and throwback photos. And for so many people, all of that brightness lands right on top of something tender and unhealed. If you have spent this weekend moving quietly through the noise, trying to hold yourself together while the world celebrates loudly around you, I want you to know that this space is for you. Not just the easy version of motherhood. All of it.

There are people reading this who lost their mothers. Some recently, some years ago, some so long ago that the grief has become a kind of background hum they have learned to live around. Grief does not follow the calendar, and it does not care that everyone else seems to be buying flowers and making phone calls. If you lost your mother, whether to death, to addiction, to mental illness, to estrangement, or to the particular kind of loss that comes when someone is still breathing but no longer present, your grief is real. You are allowed to sit with it today. You do not have to perform healing you are not feeling.

I want to speak clinically for a moment, and also personally, because I think both matter here. What we know from attachment theory and grief research is that the loss of a maternal figure does not simply fade with time. It reorganizes. The holidays, the milestones, the quiet Tuesday mornings when you want to call someone who already knows your voice, those are the moments when grief reasserts itself. It is not weakness. It is love with nowhere to go. And if you can hold that reframe today, I want you to try. Your grief is not a problem. It is evidence of a bond that mattered.

Now I want to talk about something that does not get enough space in the Mother’s Day conversation. I want to talk about the mothers who are still here, still trying, still showing up, and still hurting in a way that does not make the greeting cards.

I am a mother. I love my children with everything I have. And I also know, from the inside, what it feels like to parent a child who is struggling in ways that a mother’s love alone cannot fix. Mental health challenges. Substance use. Choices that keep you awake at three in the morning wondering what you missed, what you could have done differently, whether they are safe, whether they know they are loved even when the relationship feels fractured and far. I know what it is to pour yourself into someone and watch them walk into pain anyway. I know what it is to love a child who is not yet ready to receive that love in the way you are offering it.

This is a grief that does not have a name most people recognize. Your child is alive. You should be grateful. You should be hopeful. And you are, fiercely, relentlessly. But you are also carrying something heavy, and the weight of it does not go away because someone reminds you that it could be worse. Ambiguous loss, as the researchers call it, is the experience of grieving someone who is still present but not fully available to you. It is one of the most disorienting forms of pain a person can carry because the story has not ended and you do not know how it will.

What I hold onto, and what I want to offer you if you are in this place, is that hope is not the same thing as certainty. Hope does not require resolution. It does not require that your child has gotten it together, that the phone has stopped being a source of dread, or that last Thanksgiving went the way you prayed it would. Hope is a choice you make in the absence of evidence, because you have decided that the door stays open. That is not naivety. That is one of the most clinically sound and emotionally mature things a human being can do. People recover. People find their way back. The story is not over.

And if you are a grandmother raising grandchildren because their parent could not, I see you. You did not plan for this chapter. You love those children with everything you have, and you carry the heartbreak of watching your own child struggle at the same time. You are holding two griefs and one very important love all at once, and the fact that you show up every morning is extraordinary. You are a mother in every way that counts.

If you are a caregiver, a foster parent, an aunt who stepped in, a family friend who became family by showing up when it mattered, this day belongs to you too. Mothering is not only biological. It is the consistent, intentional act of showing up for someone’s wellbeing when they cannot fully show up for themselves. It is witnessing. It is safety. It is the kind of presence that tells a child, or an adult, you are not alone in this world and I am not going anywhere.

What I want to leave you with today is simple and true. You do not have to be at peace with your story to honor it. You do not have to have arrived somewhere to acknowledge how far you have come. Whether you are grieving a mother you lost, loving a child who is still finding their way, or mothering someone else’s child as your own, you are doing something sacred. It is hard and it is holy and it is not supposed to look perfect.

Hold yourself with the same tenderness you would offer the people you love. That is not a small thing. On a day like today, it might be the most important thing.

With you in all of it, Dr. Tamaru