You may love today. Or you may hate it. You may feel ambivalent. Pressured by Hallmark. Delighted to celebrate the woman who raised you. Delighted to be celebrated by children of your own. You may feel sorrow today because your mother is no longer alive. Or you may feel triggered because the woman you call mother is no one you want to celebrate. You may feel a combination and range of feelings due to your own life experiences being mothered, mothering, or trying to and maybe even, in your eyes, failing.
No matter what your experience is on this day, I hope you can allow your experience to be valid, and that you take care of yourself in whatever way you need.
And, if today feels especially hard for you because you didn’t receive the kind of mothering you wanted and needed growing up, I want to share some thoughts with you that may bring you some solace and comfort and, perhaps, even inspiration for how you can view this day and more days moving forward.
I have 16 mothers. How many do you have?
“It takes a village to raise a child.”
This phrase must have been said to me a few dozen times across the course of my pregnancy and my daughter’s early infancy this past year.
Friends, neighbors, colleagues, and well-wishers would say this to me, followed quickly by offers to bring by food or to reach out to them if my husband or I needed help.
I valued their offers so much and I took (and take) comfort from these words because (no surprise here!) raising a child is hard. It’s a lot of work and it can be exhausting much of the time. Having a community and resources of all sorts around you can make it so, so much easier.
It does indeed take a village to raise a child.
And, as a therapist who specializes in complex relational trauma, I’ll say, too, that it takes a village to mother an adult.
Even if we are born to, adopted by, and raised by incredible, functional mother figures,* no mother figure is perfect.
(*Please note: Throughout this post I use the term “mother figure” because I do not believe that mothers as we experience them are necessarily gendered female. Mother figures can be male, agender, genderqueer, trans, non-binary, or any other gender idenfication. For the sake of this article I will use the term mother figure and I mean it to imply the person or persons who you personally identified with the act and emotion of mothering as a child and young adult, regardless of that person’s gender identity.)
No one single mother figure is capable of giving a child and adult all of what they need. All of the time. And in all the myriad ways this might look.
