Mother's Day is complicated for more women than the card industry would have you believe. I want to write something that holds all of it — the love, the grief, the complicated feelings, the pride, the exhaustion — without flattening any of it into a pretty caption.
I became a mother young. I had two children by the time I was 21, went back to school with a family already built, built a career while raising them and figured out the rest in motion. My daughter has since done something similar — completed her MBA while being a mother herself. I watch her and I see both of us at once: the version of me that was doing it all simultaneously and the version of her that is doing it now.
What nobody tells you when you are in the middle of it is that motherhood does not pause everything else about who you are. It adds to it. It expands you in ways that are sometimes beautiful and sometimes devastating and frequently both at the same time. And the women on the other side of it — the ones raising children, the ones who have raised them and are now watching them raise their own, the ones who mothered without the title, the ones who are mothering themselves through something — all of us deserve more than a brunch reservation and a bunch of flowers.
I also want to say this directly: Mother's Day is hard for a lot of women. For the ones who have lost their mothers. For the ones whose relationship with their mother is complicated or painful or absent. For the ones who wanted children and did not have them. For the ones who had children and lost them. For the ones who made the deliberate choice not to become mothers and spend this day navigating other people's assumptions about that choice.
If that is you today — if this day carries something heavy — I see you. This post is for you too. Maybe especially for you.
nobody fully sees.
The labour of motherhood is largely invisible. Not just the physical work — though that alone is extraordinary — but the mental load. The remembering, the anticipating, the worrying at 2am about things that may never happen. The appointments scheduled, the meals planned, the emotional temperature of your household read before you have finished your first cup of tea in the morning.
You carry things for other people that they do not even know are being carried. You make decisions daily that shape other human beings. You do this while also being a professional, a friend, a daughter, a woman with your own needs and ambitions and fears and dreams that sometimes get shelved because there is simply not enough room for them right now.
The fact that you keep going is not nothing. It is extraordinary. Even on the days when you feel like you are doing it badly. Especially on those days.
"The best mothers I know are the ones who never stopped being themselves in the process. That is not selfishness. That is the most important thing you can model for your children."
— Anjie, Style & Soul 35+the calendar.
If you are missing your mother today — whether she died recently or decades ago, whether your relationship was close or complicated — grief does not care about the date. It finds you anyway. Sometimes louder on a day the rest of the world has designated as celebratory.
My mother is still here. She is in the UK. I travel to see her every year and every visit I am aware of both how much I value it and how finite it is. I hold that. If you are holding something similar today — or something already gone — I want you to know that your grief is not out of place. It belongs here too.
Be gentle with yourself today. You do not have to perform joy if you do not feel it. You do not have to explain why this day is hard. You are allowed to feel whatever you actually feel.
a lesser version.
If you chose not to have children — for whatever reason, which is yours alone and requires no justification — today probably involves at least one well-meaning person asking a question that is not theirs to ask. Or a quiet awareness of how much of the world's attention and cultural currency flows toward a role you did not choose.
You have built something with your life. That something is real and worthy and complete. The fact that it looks different from the expected shape is not a deficit. The expected shape was never the only shape.
And for the women for whom it was not a choice — who wanted children and navigated infertility, loss, or circumstances that made it impossible — I will not pretend that words fix anything. Only that you are seen, and that your capacity for love and care and nurturing is not wasted because it did not find that particular form.
To every woman reading this on Mother's Day:
You are doing better than you think. The standard you are holding yourself to was never designed with you in mind — it was designed by people who had no idea what it actually takes to be a woman of substance moving through the world at this particular moment.
The fact that you are still curious, still building, still showing up for other people while also — slowly, imperfectly — learning to show up for yourself. That is the work. Not the breakfast in bed or the card. The quiet, continuous, remarkable work of being fully alive and fully present in a life that is yours.
However you are spending today — with your children, with your mother, alone, with friends, getting through it minute by minute — you deserve to be seen for the whole of who you are. Not just the role. The whole woman.
Happy Mother's Day. To every version of what that means.
Anjie xFor today — and every day after it — these are the things I want you to carry with you.