Choose to honor where you're at this Mother's Day
This will be the eighth Mother’s Day without my mom.
My first motherless Mother’s Day was like driving through a neverending fog. I couldn’t see where I was going. I just tried my best to navigate through the treacherous day.
My dad, brother, and I went out to lunch with a family friend and her family. It was hard seeing all of the women celebrate their mothers at their tables while there was one missing at ours. I tried my best to stay off of social media to avoid seeing the celebratory posts. I knew logging off for the day was the kind thing to do for myself.
My grief was a raging thunderstorm. I thought it would rain like that forever. There can be two types of grieving people. The ones who say it gets better and the ones who say it doesn’t. I think grief holds more nuance than that. It doesn’t get better in the sense that the pain goes away completely. As the years pass, my experience with grief changes. I carry it with me instead of being completely devoured by it.
A workshop I attended for Motherless Daughters advised creating a plan to honor your mother on Mother’s Day instead of planning nothing at all. In previous years, planning felt like an impossible task because I was trying to make the day perfect. I wanted to honor my mom the right way.
I’m here to tell you that there is no right or perfect way to honor your mom. It can be something as simple as lighting a candle, buying her favorite flowers, or writing her a letter. If you decide to do nothing, that’s okay too. The most important thing you can do is honor and meet yourself where you’re at.
Mother’s Day as a motherless daughter is akin to having no one to sit at lunch with. It’s like being kicked out of an exclusive club while everyone gets to enjoy the benefits. For a long time, I felt like an outsider. Mother’s Day felt like a day that I could no longer partake in.
When I stopped looking at this day as a day that I could no longer participate in, I felt better. I choose to not only honor my mother. I choose to also honor the women in my life who have and continue to mother me. My nana, my aunts, my favorite writers, and other women I look up to.
In the U.S., the idea for Mother’s Day came to fruition because a woman named Anna Jarvis held a memorial service to honor her mom. President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday on May 12, 1914, and companies used the day to make money by encouraging people to buy gifts.
I won’t tell you to stay strong or that your mother wouldn’t want you to be sad. If this is your first Mother’s Day without your mom, you can choose to opt out. You can choose to do nothing. You can choose to stay in bed and cry if that’s all you have energy for. You don’t need to be strong. It’s safe to fall apart.
Your grief will never go away, but the one thing you can count on is that it will evolve if you choose to acknowledge it and be with it. It won’t always be this way. The one thing you can count on is change.
Things I’ve Been Processing Lately
-I read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson last month. Wilkerson discusses how America operated and continues to operate under a caste system similar to the ones in India and Nazi Germany. This book opened my eyes to so much I didn’t know about.
-Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman helped me during the early days of grief.
-This article by the Columbia Daily Spectator in collaboration with New York Magazine about the protests and encampments at Columbia University.
-Operation Olive Branch is a grassroots effort that’s dedicated to amplifying Palestinian voices and helping families evacuate Gaza. They put together a spreadsheet with lists of GoFundMe fundraisers and organizations you can donate to.
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