The Mother’s Day Duality
- lindsay-michele
- May 9
- 5 min read
This is for every woman holding two things at once today.
There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles in on Mother’s Day when your own mother is gone.
It’s not the quiet of a peaceful morning or a house still sleeping.
It’s the quiet of an absence so familiar by now that you’ve almost learned to live around it. Like furniture in the dark. You know it’s there. You know how to move around it. You almost convince yourself you’ve adjusted.
And then a day like Mother’s Day’s that comes, and you walk right into it anyway.
You are a mother.
People will celebrate you.
Your kids will hand you something homemade with enormous pride, or bring you coffee the wrong way, or say Happy Mother’s Day, Mom in that casual, half-distracted way kids do, not knowing that four words just cracked something open in your chest.
Because the person who made you a daughter is no longer here.
And there’s no words to ever warn you how much you will need her on the very day the world is telling you to be celebrated.
The Double Weight Nobody Talks About
Mother’s Day when you’re grieving your mom is complicated as hell.
You are supposed to receive love today. And you are. But you are also supposed to give it, because you are someone’s mother too, and they need you present, warm, here.
So you hold both.
You smile at the crayon drawing.
You eat the slightly burnt breakfast.
You say thank you, baby, I love it and you mean it completely, even as another part of you is quietly whispering:
I wish I could call her.
This is the part nobody puts on the greeting cards.
Grief does not pause for holidays.
It shows up louder for them.
The little things that used to connect you to her, the phone call first thing in the morning, brunch, the flowers you’d pick out, her voice saying Happy Mother’s Day, sweetheart, those things do not just fade.
They leave a shape.
And every year, on this particular Sunday in May, you feel the outline of that shape so clearly it almost takes your breath away.
You are not doing it wrong if today is hard.
You are not doing it wrong if you cry in the bathroom before coming back out to blow out the candles on the pancakes your kids made.
You are not doing it wrong if joy and grief arrive at the exact same moment and you don’t know which one to let in first.
Let them both in.
That is the only way through.
What She Gave You That She Can Never Take Back
Here is the thing about being a mother after losing your own mother:
You start to see her everywhere.
In the way you instinctively reach for your child when they trip.
In the patience you find on days you were sure you had none left.
In the way you say I love you before hanging up the phone, every single time, because somewhere along the way you learned, really learned, that you never know which call is the last one.
She lives in your hands when you are doing something you watched her do a thousand times and never realized you were memorizing.
She lives in the things you say without thinking, phrases that used to be hers and somehow became yours.
She lives in your children, who carry pieces of her without even realizing it. Maybe they knew her. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they didn’t get enough time. Maybe they only know her through stories.
But she is still there.
You are the bridge between who she was and who they will become.
That is not a small thing.
That is an enormous, sacred thing.
And it means she is not entirely gone.
She is here, in you, in the mother you became, shaped by her, steadied by her, carrying her forward in ways you may not even fully see yet.
Permission to Feel All of It
If you need someone to say it plainly today, let it be this:
You are allowed to grieve today.
You are allowed to miss her so much it feels physical. A weight in your chest. A lump in your throat. A sudden ache that shows up when you were just trying to get through the day.
You are allowed to feel cheated.
You are allowed to be angry that other people still have what you don’t.
You are allowed to look at Mother’s Day posts online and feel something twist inside you that is not exactly jealousy and not exactly sadness, but somewhere between the two.
You are also allowed to have a good day.
You are allowed to laugh with your kids.
You are allowed to feel genuinely happy.
You are allowed to receive love without treating that happiness like a betrayal.
Grief does not require misery.
Your mother would not want your joy held hostage by her absence. And somewhere, in the part of you that knew her best, you know that is true.
You are allowed to do something to honor her today.
Light a candle.
Visit her grave.
Cook something she loved.
Say her name out loud.
Tell your kids a story about her.
Grief hurts differently when you give it somewhere to go instead of letting it spin inside of you all day.
And you are allowed to simply survive today.
Do the bare minimum.
Get through it.
Call that enough.
Because some years, that is enough.
Some years, you get to the end of the day and the only thing you accomplished was feeling it without running from it.
And that is its own kind of courage.
To the Mothers Who Are Mothering Without Their Mom
This day was never designed with you in mind.
The ads, the brunches, the flower displays, the perfectly worded captions, they are built for a version of this holiday that assumes everyone’s mother is a phone call away.
They do not account for the women pouring love into their children while quietly running on empty, because the person who used to refill them is gone.
But you are here.
You showed up.
You are doing the thing she did.
You are loving someone smaller than you with your whole heart.
You are putting them first on a day that is technically about you.
You are keeping the ritual going, even when the ritual costs you something.
That is extraordinary.
Even when it does not feel like it.
Especially when it does not feel like it.
She raised someone who became the mom now.
She raised someone who shows up.
She raised you.
And you are still here.
Still going.
Still loving.
Still carrying her with you, whether you feel it today or not.
Happy Mother’s Day.
To you, and to her.
If this resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it today. And if you’re in the thick of it, the hard, quiet, complicated thick of it, know you are not alone.
-Lindsay Michele
💜