by Autumn Colon
Mother wounds, grief, and the emotional weight many women carry into Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day has a way of finding tender places.
Even before the actual day arrives, something begins to shift. The advertisements start. The flower promotions. The matching pajama photos. The captions about unconditional love and gratitude.
And quietly, for many women, something tightens in the chest.
Because Mother’s Day doesn’t just ask us to celebrate motherhood. It asks us to confront our relationship with it. The ways we’ve experienced it, longed for it, struggled within it, grieved through it, or tried desperately to survive it.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that holidays often act as emotional mirrors. They reflect the things we haven’t fully made sense of yet. And Mother’s Day tends to hold many layers at once: love, grief, resentment, longing, guilt, tenderness, pressure.
Sometimes all in the same breath.
And while Mother’s Day is often marketed as a celebration, for many women it can feel more like a mirror, reflecting back relationships, losses, expectations, and identities that feel far more complicated than a greeting card can hold.
Because this holiday doesn’t just touch mothers. It touches daughters. Women grieving mothers. Women grieving children. Women longing to become mothers. Women questioning whether they want motherhood at all. Women carrying the quiet pressure of a world that still often treats motherhood as the defining measure of womanhood.
And that emotional weight can surface in deeply personal ways.
I’ve sat with mothers who spent the day surrounded by family yet felt deeply alone. Women grieving mothers who are still alive, but emotionally unreachable. Daughters trying to force closeness where there has only ever been distance. Mothers quietly overstimulated and emotionally exhausted while still trying to make the day beautiful for everyone else.
Grief, gratitude, belonging, longing; the holiday has a way of bubbling it all to the surface.
The Quiet Performance of Motherhood
One of the hardest things about Mother’s Day is the expectation attached to it.
There’s an unspoken script many women feel pressured to follow. Be grateful. Be fulfilled. Be present. Enjoy every moment. Don’t make it complicated. But motherhood is complicated (trust me; I’m in the trenches with you).
You can love your children with your whole heart and still feel overwhelmed by the constant emotional labor of caring for everyone else. You can feel grateful and exhausted. Needed and invisible. Deeply connected and completely disconnected from yourself at the same time.
That contradiction doesn’t make you ungrateful. It makes you human.
I think many mothers quietly spend Mother’s Day trying to convince themselves they should feel differently than they actually do. And that emotional performance can be exhausting.
When the Mother Wound Shows Up
For some women, Mother’s Day doesn’t just bring up motherhood. It brings up the ache of being mothered.
The relationship with your mother may have been loving, inconsistent, critical, emotionally distant, or difficult in ways that are hard to explain to people who only see the surface.
This is often where the mother wound quietly rises to the surface.
Not always dramatically. Sometimes it shows up subtly. A heavy feeling while scrolling social media. Irritability you can’t place. The dread of making a phone call you don’t emotionally have the capacity for. Buying a card that doesn’t fully reflect the relationship you actually have. The grief of realizing you’re still longing for something you may never fully receive.
I’ve worked with women who feel guilty for needing distance from their mothers while simultaneously grieving the closeness they wish existed. Women who became caretakers emotionally long before they were ever cared for themselves. Mother’s Day can intensify those contradictions.
Because this holiday often centers on the idea that mother-daughter relationships are naturally soft, nurturing, and uncomplicated. And for many women, that simply hasn’t been their reality.
The Women Mother’s Day Leaves Out
One of the hardest things about Mother’s Day is how narrowly womanhood is often framed within it.
The holiday tends to center one version of femininity: nurturing, fulfilled, maternal, and celebrated. And for women whose experiences fall outside of that narrative, the day can feel quietly alienating.
I think about the women who wanted children and could not have them. Women grieving miscarriages no one fully acknowledged. Women navigating infertility while surrounded by celebration. Mothers grieving children they’ve lost. Women estranged from their children. Women who chose not to become mothers and still feel the weight of society asking them to explain why.
And I think about how many women spend this holiday questioning themselves in silence.
Because beneath Mother’s Day is often a deeper cultural message: that motherhood is what completes a woman. That nurturing should come naturally. That fulfillment should live here.
But womanhood has always been more expansive than one role, one path, or one story.
As a therapist, I’ve seen how much shame women carry when their experiences don’t align with the version of motherhood the world celebrates most comfortably. And I think many women need permission to understand that grief, relief, ambivalence, longing, peace, sadness, or uncertainty can all coexist here too.
No one should have to perform belonging on a day that already feels emotionally loaded.
You Don’t Have to Perform This Holiday
This Mother’s Day, I encourage women to pay attention to what they need emotionally instead of focusing only on what’s expected of them.
For some women, that means creating space for celebration and connection. For others, it means allowing the day to be quieter, slower, or more protected.
When I sit with women around Mother’s Day, I encourage them to make meaning of their own personal connection with womanhood, motherhood, mothering, and identity. Sometimes we talk about boundaries. Sometimes we talk about grief. Sometimes we talk about disappointment, guilt, resentment, or exhaustion that has gone unnamed for too long.
And sometimes, the work is simply giving yourself permission to stop pretending the day feels easier than it does.
I think many women carry an invisible pressure to make everyone else comfortable with their emotional experience. To soften it. To explain it away. To minimize what hurts. But you do not have to abandon yourself to make a holiday feel more palatable for other people.
Sit with this…you are allowed to move through Mother’s Day honestly (period).
That honesty may look like stepping away from certain conversations. It may look like grieving. It may look like letting yourself enjoy parts of the day without forcing joy into all of it. It may look like acknowledging that this holiday brings up more than one feeling at a time. And none of that makes you ungrateful.
It makes you emotionally aware, honest with yourself, and more connected to what you truly need.
Holding Grief and Gratitude at the Same Time
Mother’s Day has a way of asking women to carry multiple truths at once.
You can feel deeply grateful for your children while grieving how much motherhood has changed you. You can appreciate your mother for what she did provide while still mourning what you needed and never received. You can feel love and disappointment. Closeness and distance. Joy and exhaustion. Relief and sadness.
Both things can exist at the same time.
But many women were never taught how to hold emotional complexity without feeling guilty for it. We’re often encouraged to simplify our experiences into something easier for other people to understand. Either the relationship was good or bad. Either motherhood feels fulfilling or overwhelming. Either you’re grateful or you’re grieving.
Real life rarely works that way.
As a therapist, I often find myself reminding women that emotional contradiction is not dysfunction. It’s part of being human. Especially within family relationships, where love and pain are often deeply intertwined.
Sometimes the grief Mother’s Day brings up isn’t only about loss. Sometimes it’s grief for what never fully existed in the first place. The mothering you longed for. The support you hoped would come naturally. The version of motherhood you imagined before living its reality. The child you lost. The child you hoped for. The relationship you keep trying to repair. The softer version of yourself you miss.
And sometimes gratitude exists right beside that grief.
Gratitude for survival. Gratitude for your children. Gratitude for growth. Gratitude for the ways you are learning to love differently, even while carrying the weight of what hurt you.
I think healing often begins when women stop forcing themselves to choose one emotional truth over another.
You do not have to erase your grief to acknowledge what you’re grateful for. And you do not have to silence your gratitude in order to honor what hurts.
There are seasons where Mother’s Day may feel warm and connective. And there are seasons where it may feel tender, lonely, triggering, or emotionally complicated. Neither experience says something bad about you.
It simply means you’re carrying a life that has loved, lost, hoped, adapted, survived, and changed. And all those experiences deserve compassion.
A Final Thought
Mother’s Day tends to magnify whatever already feels tender.
For some women, that tenderness comes from love. For others, it comes from grief, disappointment, distance, longing, exhaustion, or the complicated reality of trying to mother while still healing from your own experiences of being mothered.
Mother’s Day often asks women to fit themselves into simplified narratives about love, family, fulfillment, and femininity. But real life is rarely that simple.
For many women, this holiday brings up not only relationships, but identity. The expectations placed on women to nurture, to mother, to want motherhood, to heal family wounds quietly, to perform gratitude even while carrying grief.
And many women are holding far more than the world can see.
If this day feels heavy for you, you are not alone in that.
You are allowed to experience Mother’s Day in your own way.
You are allowed to protect your peace.
You are allowed to hold gratitude and grief in the same hand.
Sometimes the most healing thing we can do is stop forcing ourselves to feel differently than we honestly do.
These are the reminders I return to during this season, both in my work as a therapist and in my own reflections around family, care, and emotional inheritance.
If this resonated with you, I hope you move through this Mother’s Day with gentleness toward yourself. And if you’ve found ways to care for yourself through emotionally complicated seasons like this one, you’re welcome to share them. Someone else may need that reminder too.
A Gentle Takeaway
No matter what Mother’s Day brings up for you, grief, gratitude, relief, longing, love, anger, numbness, peace, or uncertainty, your experience deserves compassion.
There is no one “correct” way to move through this day.
- You do not have to force yourself into celebration if your heart feels heavy.
- You do not have to explain your boundaries to deserve them.
- You do not have to measure your womanhood through motherhood to have a meaningful life.
- You do not have to hide the complicated parts of your story to make other people comfortable.
And if you need a reminder to affirm yourself this Mother’s Day, let it be this:
- My experience is valid, even when it looks different from others.
- I am allowed to hold grief and gratitude at the same time.
- My worth is not defined by one role, relationship, or expectation.
- I do not have to perform healing to deserve care.
- I am allowed to move through this season honestly.
