I recently found a necklace after my mom passed. I was drawn to its simplicity and felt comfort in wearing it, though I could not explain why it felt different or where it even came from. I put it on and have not taken it off since. Lately, I catch myself reaching for it when I am anxious, twisting it between my fingers without even thinking, and I did not really understand why.
Today, on Mother’s Day, I was looking through old photos and found one of my mom and me on my First Communion day. And there it was. The necklace. I do not remember the necklace at all, but I remember the dress vividly because my mom made it for me. I remember how proud I was to wear something she created with her own hands. Proud that my mom made it just for me. Funny that I found that photo today. Mother’s Day.
Mother’s Day has never been an easy day for me. Not as a daughter. Not as a mother. And now, especially not without my mom here. I think there is this expectation that Mother’s Day is supposed to feel soft and warm and easy. Beautiful cards. Perfect brunches. Matching smiles in photos. Everyone calling their mom their “best friend.” And if that is your story, I genuinely love that for you. But it has never quite been mine.
I did not have the quintessential mother-daughter relationship. My relationship with my mom was complicated. Layered. Heavy at times. Beautiful at times too. I loved my mother deeply. Fiercely. I admired her more than I can even explain. She was brilliant, accomplished, talented, respected, and capable of making absolutely anything feel elegant and intentional. She taught me to notice beauty. To appreciate history. To understand that there is value in tradition, in details, in doing things well. But being her daughter was not easy.
Her expectations were always high. Sometimes impossibly high. It took me years to understand that no matter what I achieved, accomplished, fixed, managed, or became, I would never fully make her happy in the way I desperately wanted to. That realization is painful to admit out loud because I know she loved me. She did. Absolutely. But love is complicated sometimes. People love from the places they know, and sometimes the way someone loves you is not the way you need to receive love. That has been one of the hardest lessons of my life.
Still, she shaped me into the woman I am today. Both because of her love and in spite of it. Because of her expectations and despite the weight of them. I carry so much of her in me. The good. The hard. The beautiful. The impossible.
Mother’s Day itself was never really about me. It was about honoring the mothers and women in the family first and foremost. The expectation of making the day special was always there. The planning. The pressure. The responsibility of making everyone feel celebrated and cared for. It was never about me. Ever. And honestly? I know how heavy that can feel. Thus I never want my own children to carry that kind of emotional obligation for me. I do not want them to feel responsible for my happiness. It took me years of therapy to figure out that I am responsible for my own happiness. I do not want my kids to spend their lives trying to earn love or approval or peace from me. That cycle ends here if I can help it.
And the truth is, I have not been a perfect mother. Not even close. There are moments I wish I could redo. Seasons I wish I had handled differently. Choices I made from fear, overwhelm, anger, survival mode, trauma, exhaustion. None of those are excuses. They are simply truths. I have apologized to my children, and I will continue to apologize when I get it wrong because I think mothers should. I think accountability matters.
I have always done the best I could with who I was at the time. And sometimes that version of me was struggling more than anyone realized. The reality is that each of my children got a different version of me as their mother because I was a different person while raising each one of them. Youthful. Older. Wiser. More wounded. More healed. More patient. Less patient. More financially secure. More emotionally exhausted. Every child enters a different chapter of our lives, and motherhood evolves whether we want it to or not. That does not mean the love was different. It means I was. And maybe that is the part nobody talks about enough.
Mothers are not perfect humans. They are simply human beings trying to carry the enormous responsibility of loving and shaping other human beings while often still healing themselves. We are flawed and fabulous all wrapped into one complicated package.
So today, Mother’s Day holds all of it for me at once. Love. Grief. Joy. Sadness. Gratitude. Regret. Admiration. Anger. Compassion. Longing. And maybe that is okay. Maybe motherhood was never meant to fit neatly into greeting cards and social media captions. Maybe the most honest thing we can do is tell the truth about it.
Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace
Kristine Binder 