The Empowered Therapist

TL;DR: The cultural script around Mother’s Day asks every one of us to feel and behave the same way on a day when our actual experiences of being mothered vary enormously. For people with complicated mother stories, the gap between the script and the lived reality creates a quiet, exhausting pressure to perform a feeling that is not present. The work is not to force the feeling, but to give yourself permission to honor the day in a way that reflects what is actually true for you.

There is a script that gets handed to us this time of year, and most of us absorbed it long before we had any say in the matter. The script says that mothers are to be celebrated. That children, no matter how old, are to express gratitude. That the day is supposed to feel a particular way, and if it doesn’t, something is wrong with you for not getting on board.

The script is not neutral, it is reinforced everywhere, from advertising to social media to family gatherings to the small talk at the office on Monday morning. And it presumes a kind of universal experience of motherhood that simply does not exist. For people whose mother stories are uncomplicated and warm, the script may line up with their lived experience, and the day may be mostly a happy one. But for many others, the script and the lived experience do not match. What gets created in that gap is often something painful. A pressure to perform a feeling that isn’t actually present. An obligation to honor someone whose impact on you was anything but honoring. A sense that your real, internal experience of the day is somehow inappropriate or ungrateful or wrong.

When we look at this through the lens of attachment, it becomes clearer why a single day on the calendar can carry so much weight. Our earliest relationships with caregivers shape the way we understand love, safety, presence, and worth. When those relationships were attuned and steady, we tend to internalize a sense that we’re worth showing up for. When they weren’t, we tend to internalize something harder to articulate. A subtle doubt about whether we deserve care at all. The body remembers what the mind has worked to forget. And a day that calls everyone to celebrate the very relationship that was a source of pain can activate that old doubt in ways that catch us off guard.

What you are experiencing in those moments is your nervous system doing what nervous systems do, which is responding to cues that are connected, often unconsciously, to formative experiences. The wave of sadness in the card aisle is not random. The irritation when someone asks what you are doing for your mom is not unreasonable. These are responses that make sense, and they deserve to be met with curiosity rather than judgment.

Dear one, here is what I want to offer you. You don’t owe anyone a performance of celebration. You don’t have to manufacture warmth where warmth was not given. You don’t have to spend the day pretending the relationship was something it wasn’t, in order to make other people more comfortable. The pressure to do so is real, and it is also not something you have to obey.

What you can do, instead, is begin to ask yourself a different question. Not how do I get through this day, but what do I actually need on this day. Those are very different questions, and they tend to lead to very different answers. For some people, the answer is to step back from social media for the weekend. For others, it is to plan something gentle and ordinary. A long walk, a meal with a chosen-family friend, an afternoon spent doing something that has nothing to do with the holiday at all. For some, it is to honor the mother you wished you had by giving yourself a small piece of what she could not. A nap. A meal cooked with attention. A day where you do not have to be useful to anyone.

Some of the most healing acts on a day like this are the simplest ones. Acknowledging out loud, even just to yourself, that the relationship was hard. Letting yourself cry without immediately trying to talk yourself out of it. Reaching for one person who knows your story and doesn’t need it explained. Lighting a candle for the mother you lost, or for the mother you wished you had, or for the child inside you who needed something more than what arrived. These small acts will not erase what was missing, and they are not meant to. What they do is begin to put you back in the driver’s seat of the day, so the script no longer dictates how you experience it.

If this Sunday is going to be hard, let it be hard. Make a plan that protects you. Reach for the people who do feel like home. Let yourself feel whatever rises up, including the contradictions, including the parts that do not make sense, even to you. Your feelings about this day do not have to be tidy in order to be valid. They just have to be honest. And whatever you choose to do, or not do, on Sunday, let it come from what is true for you, not from what the script insists you should feel.

Thanks for letting me see you,