Mother's Day is coming up, and if I'm being honest, it always brings me down.
I've thought a lot about why, and I think the only way to work through it is to just say it out loud.
My mom died when I was 10 years old. She was 32. Alcoholism took her — cirrhosis, and everything that comes with it when a body just can't hold on anymore. She was in the hospital at the end, and my family decided I shouldn't see her like that. I never got to say goodbye. I never got to hear her say she loved me. That door closed, and it never opened again.
I didn't grow up with my mom in any traditional sense. My Nana — my dad's mother — raised me from birth until I was five or six. Then my mom's sister, my aunt, took over for a few years. After my mom passed, my maternal grandparents adopted me. I was passed between people who loved me, which I'm grateful for, but the through-line of my childhood was instability, and at the center of it was a mother I barely got to know.
The memories I do have of her are sparse — and so many of them are hard. I remember being seven or eight years old and watching her throw up blood. I remember finding her boyfriend after he tried to take his own life. I was a little kid. No child should carry those images. But I did, and I do.
Here's the part that's hardest to say: I have felt resentment toward her. The feeling that she chose alcohol over me. I know, intellectually, that addiction isn't really a choice — that it's a disease that swallows people whole. But the child in me experienced it as abandonment. And that child never quite got the answer to the question he needed answered most: did you love me?
I was lucky. I had other women who mothered me along the way — my Nana, my Grandma Geraldine, my aunt, teachers in high school who showed up for me in ways they probably didn't even realize. I carry all of them with me. That love was real.
But none of it fills the specific shape of what I lost. And every year, when May rolls around and the world turns pink with flowers and brunch reservations, that shape becomes very visible again.
I'm writing this because I think there are other people out there who find Mother's Day painful for reasons that don't fit the greeting card version of the holiday. Maybe you lost your mom too early. Maybe your relationship with her was complicated or traumatic. Maybe you never got closure either.
You're not alone in that. And you don't have to pretend to be okay about it.
I'm not sure I'll ever fully resolve the grief or the resentment. But I'm learning that holding both — the love and the loss, the gratitude and the anger — might just be what it means to be human.
To anyone who finds this time of year hard: I see you.
— M
