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Every year, I buy my mother a beautiful Hallmark card for Mother’s Day.
I take my time choosing one—reading each message carefully, waiting until I find words that feel honest. Words I can stand behind. Something that reflects what I truly feel.
She loves them.
She saves them and often tells me how much they mean to her. She must have 20 or 30 years worth of cards that she keeps in a basket in her room.
It’s a ritual between us. A testament, in some ways, to the bond we’ve built over time.
Yet our relationship has not always been easy to navigate.
When I was four years old, my mother left me with my father to go seek her own life as a young woman in her early twenties. I didn’t have language for it then. I only knew that I felt lost, scared, and alone. My week-long summer vacations with her were the highlight of each year of my childhood.
I idolized her.
When she returned years later, and I lived with her as a teenager, our relationship carried a growing tension. We were close, but without clear boundaries we more like friends than mother and daughter. There was love, but also confusion. A lack of steadiness. A sense that something foundational had never quite taken root. I needed her to mother me. She did not know how.
Understanding what I was truly feeling would take years.
An ache. A core belief that I was unlovable because my own mom did not know how to love me in the way I needed her to.
For a long time, I thought this ache meant something was wrong—with me, with her, with our relationship. I thought it needed to be fixed. That I needed to be fixed.
Over time, after years of inner work, a new understanding emerged.
The ache wasn’t a problem.
It was a doorway.
Mother’s Day can be a complicated threshold.
On the surface, it’s a day of flowers, gratitude, and celebration. And for many of us, there is real love to honor.
But beneath that, there can also be a more tender longing that we can’t quite articulate but sense as an undercurrent within our hearts.
A tension between what was given and what was missing.
Between love and longing.
Between gratitude and grief.
And this is not only true for those of us with clearly difficult maternal bonds.
Even when our mothers loved us deeply—even when they did the best they could—we often learned, in subtle, unseen ways, to adapt ourselves to belong.
To be loved.
To stay connected.
We learned to suppress certain feelings. To shape ourselves around expectations. To become who we thought we needed to be.
In doing so, we often leave parts of ourselves behind.
This, too, is part of the mother wound.
Because our mothers were once daughters, too.
They were shaped by their own longings, their own unmet needs, and their own attempts to belong in the world they were given. And so much of what is passed between generations is not only love but also the patterns we never had the chance to question, let alone heal.
For me, healing the mother wound has never meant turning against my mother—it has been about returning to myself.
It has been about learning to feel what I once pushed aside.
Learning to listen to my own inner voice, rather than the one shaped by fear or adaptation.
Learning, slowly, to become a different kind of mother within my own being that can hold, soothe, and stay present with what arises.
This is why I call it the ache. A longing for wholeness that requires us to be with what is rather than what we think should have been. Acceptance.
And in being with it—honestly, compassionately—we begin to come home to ourselves.
So this Mother’s Day, I will still buy a card. (Preferably a large one with gorgeous flowers on the cover.) I will still choose the words inside carefully and honor the love that exists between us in ways that feel true.
At the same time, I hold something deeper.
An awareness that the greatest gift I can offer—to myself and to my maternal lineage—is presence.
A willingness to meet what is here with honesty.
To recognize where I have abandoned myself, and gently return.
To see my mother not only as “my mother,” but as a human being shaped by her own path.
Just yesterday, I was speaking with her on the phone.
She told me how much it meant to her that we are close now. There was a softness in her voice—a kind of ease that hasn’t always been there.
We spoke, simply and honestly, about the healing that has unfolded between us over the years.
How meeting what was painful—together, and with honesty—has allowed something to shift.
It has been healing for me.
And it has been equally healing for her.
The belief she carried for so long that she had been a “bad mother” has begun to soften and release.
I find myself able to thank her for her love. For her presence. For her willingness to grow alongside me.
I shared with her that I am writing about this journey—that a book called The Mother Ache is coming into the world this May on Mother’s day, that includes parts of what we have healed together. Our journey.
I sensed a brief pause of hesitation. A trace of fear.
And I understood that, too.
So I told her the truth I carry most deeply:
That I love my mother.
That I will always love my mother.
That nothing I write comes from blame but from a longing for wholeness.
From a desire to understand, to heal, and to honor the complexity of what it means to be human, and to belong to one another.
Perhaps this is another way to approach Mother’s Day.
As an invitation.
To reflect.
To soften.
To notice what is alive within us.
And to take one small step toward our own wholeness by listening to the ache and honoring it as our own healing path rather than turning away from it or denying it out of inherited loyalty.
Because beneath the ache, there is something steady.
Something true.
Something that has always been waiting for us to return.
~
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