Sometimes, Mother's Day doesn't fit anymore

Content note: This letter discusses motherhood, abuse, loss of custody, suicide and maternal relationships. Read with care.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day in the UK. Maybe you saw the posts; flowers, brunches, cards about “the woman who gave me everything.” Maybe you felt nothing, or maybe you felt too much. Both make sense and can sometimes coexist together.

Mother’s Day operates on the assumption that motherhood is simple and good, that it’s always been a source of safety and love. For survivors, that assumption can feel like another country. One you don’t have a passport to.

You might be a mother yourself, trying to figure out how to celebrate a role that’s been weaponised against you. He used your children to keep you trapped… threatened to take them, told them lies about you, made you choose between their safety and your own. Or maybe you did leave, and now you parent across a custody arrangement designed by people who don’t understand coercive control. Every handover is a negotiation. Every decision gets scrutinised. You love your children with a ferocity that terrifies you, and you’re exhausted from having to prove that love to judges and social workers and his family who think you’re hysterical, dramatic, making it up.

Or maybe the worst thing happened and you lost them. Not because you weren’t a good mother but because the system believed him, or because staying would have killed you (whether by his or your hands) and leaving meant losing custody, or because he had more money for lawyers, or because you have a diagnosis now (PTSD, depression,… the things abuse gave you) and that was used as evidence of unfitness. You are a mother without your children and Mother’s Day is a day that insists you don’t exist.

Maybe you’re a mother who stayed longer than you wanted to because you thought children needed a father, needed an intact family, needed you to try harder. And now you’re carrying the guilt of what they saw, what they learned, the fights they overheard or the silence they absorbed. You tell yourself you were protecting them by staying, but you also know what staying taught them about love. Both of those things are true and you have to hold them both.

Or maybe your own mother is the reason Mother’s Day feels impossible. She was the one who told you to go back to him. She defended him. She said marriage is hard, that you provoke him, that you’re too sensitive, that this is just what men are like. Or she didn’t defend him but she didn’t defend you either, she looked away because it was easier or because she didn’t know what to do or because she’d survived her own version and normalised yours. The woman who was supposed to protect you taught you that your safety was negotiable. That’s a specific kind of betrayal and it doesn’t get a pretty card.

Or your mother was the abuser. She used control, humiliation, violence. She was the first person who taught you that love and harm could live in the same hands. And now everyone’s posting about how mothers are saints and you’re sitting with the knowledge that yours wasn’t, that you deserved better, that you’re still untangling what she did from who you are.

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The cultural script around motherhood is relentless; mothers are self-sacrificing, endlessly patient, naturally nurturing. If you’re a mother who is angry, traumatised, struggling, or simply trying to survive, that script has no room for you. And if you’ve chosen not to be a mother, or if biology made that choice for you, or if motherhood just isn’t part of your story, Mother’s Day can feel like an entire day dedicated to something you’re supposed to want but don’t, or do want but can’t have.

Feminism has been wrestling with this for decades; the difference between motherhood as an identity women are allowed to claim and motherhood as an institution designed to keep women compliant, domestic, self-erasing. Adrienne Rich wrote about this in the 1970s and we’re still living it. The version of motherhood that gets celebrated on Mother’s Day is the sanitised one, the one where women give and give and never ask for anything back, where suffering is noble and boundaries are selfish.

That version doesn’t make space for mothers who left. For mothers who are angry. For mothers who are healing and can’t perform gratitude yet. For mothers whose children are being raised by someone else. For women who never wanted to be mothers or who are grieving the children they don’t have.

If you’re navigating motherhood while also navigating trauma, you’re doing something the culture doesn’t have language for. You’re trying to raise children while your own nervous system is still learning what safety feels like. You’re setting boundaries they might not understand yet because you never had any modelled for you. You’re breaking cycles while also just trying to get through bedtime without falling apart.

And if you’re estranged from your own mother, or grieving her, or sitting with complicated feelings that don’t fit into a card, you’re navigating something equally hard. The pressure to reconcile, to forgive, to honour her anyway because she’s your mother; that pressure doesn’t account for what she did or didn’t do, what she enabled, what she refused to see.

Mother’s Day asks you to perform a simplicity that your life doesn’t contain.

You don’t owe anyone that performance. Not your children, not your mother, not the culture that insists motherhood is sacred and uncomplicated. You can sit this one out. You can feel every contradictory thing at once: love and rage, grief and relief, pride and exhaustion. You can be a good mother and a struggling one. You can honour your own mother and also acknowledge the harm. You can want your children back and also need space to heal. You can be child-free and unbothered or child-free and grieving. All of it is real.

If yesterday felt heavy or hollow or just wrong: that’s information. It tells you something about what you’ve survived and what you’re still carrying. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means the day itself is too small for the reality you’re living.

Motherhood, like survival, is more complicated than the card aisle knows.

Thank you for being here… exactly as you are, and exactly where you are in your healing ♡

Warmly,

Debbie x

Some things to sit with if you’re ready:

• What does motherhood mean to you, separate from what you were told it should mean?

• If you could design a Mother’s Day that actually honoured your reality, what would it include?

• What do you need today that yesterday couldn’t give you?

If this brought something up:

• Women’s Aid: 0808 2000 247 (24/7)

• Gingerbread (single parent support): 0808 802 0925

• Family Rights Group (custody support): 0808 801 0366