Mother’s Day: When It’s Less Than Perfect

Mother’s Day arrives every year carrying its assumptions. The card aisle. The brunch reservations. The call. We send flowers, sit at tables, post photographs. The assumption here is all is perfect in these Mother/child relationships. But one thing that’s emerging as acknowledgement of the often less-than-perfect dynamic is the rise of opt-out of Mother’s Day emails. Mother’s Day can be complicated, and often painful. Here are some thoughts on Mother’s Day: when it’s less than perfect.

For most people, the day fits. It may be imperfect, the way most things are, but it’s recognizable. They love their mothers. They have complicated feelings, sure, but the central fact of love is intact, and the day has meaning.

When Mother’s Day changes for us

For some of us, it doesn’t fit at all. Maybe it used to and it no longer does. Maybe our own mother is no longer alive. Maybe we always thought we’d be a mother and we’re not. Maybe we have a complicated relationship with our own children.

The fact is that it’s our relationship with our own mother that’s most often fraught. We can keep working on our relationship with our own children, and if we’re not a mother and wish we were, we have many options to make this a reality.

But it can be the fraught relationship we have with our own mother, or the fact that she’s no longer alive that’s often the heaviest weight to bear. And every year, around this week, we go through some version of the same quiet calculation: how to get through it, what to do with the day, how to manage the dissonance between what we’re supposed to feel and what we actually feel.

When the day is less than perfect

This post will speak most for those of us who have arrived, after years or decades of trying, at the realization that the relationship with our mother is not going to be repaired. Not because we didn’t try. Not because they didn’t want it. But because some relationships, for reasons that have nothing to do with us, are not available for repair. And recognizing that, finally, can be its own kind of release.

I’m writing this with one hand on my own experience and the other on the experience of the many readers I know are feeling something similar. We don’t talk about this much, and the silence only makes it worse.

Why the mother relationship is different from any other

Most of us understand, intellectually, that some relationships in our lives will not work. The friendship that ends. The marriage that doesn’t last. The colleague we couldn’t make peace with. We have language for these. We have permission, eventually, to walk away from them.

The mother relationship is different. For most of human history, and across nearly every culture, the bond between mother and child has been treated as both natural and inviolable. The very phrase “a mother’s love” is shorthand for a kind of unconditional regard that is supposed to be the bedrock of everything else. When it isn’t there, or isn’t safe, or isn’t possible, there is no easy place to put that.

Why we keep trying when it’s less than perfect

This is part of why those of us who carry difficult mother relationships often spend so long trying. It isn’t only that we want the relationship to be different. It’s that the absence of repair feels like something that must be our fault. If a mother’s love is the most natural thing in the world, then surely the failure of it is something the child can fix, given enough effort, enough therapy, enough patience, enough understanding. Surely the next conversation will be the one. Surely if we can just get the approach right.

Most of us who recognize themselves in this paragraph have spent years inside that. Many of us have spent decades. The fact that we’re still trying, still hoping, still adjusting our approach isn’t evidence of weakness. It’s evidence of how powerful the cultural and psychological forces are that keep us trying past all reasonable evidence. We don’t give up on this relationship easily, and we shouldn’t. Until, eventually, we have to.

Accepting that a relationship cannot be repaired is one of the loneliest acts of clarity available to us. It is also, sometimes, one of the most liberating.

On forgiveness, reconciliation, and the limits of repair

There is a distinction psychologists make about the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. They are related, but they are not the same.

Forgiveness, in the psychological sense, is an internal process. It is something one person can do alone. It’s the work of releasing the grip of resentment, of no longer being held hostage by what happened, of reclaiming the energy that anger has been quietly absorbing us for years. It does not require the other person to apologize, to acknowledge what happened, or to be in our life at all.

Reconciliation is a different thing entirely. Reconciliation is interpersonal. It requires both people. It requires, at minimum, some willingness on both sides to acknowledge what happened, to be accountable for it, and to participate in building something different from what came before.

When it’s less than perfect, it takes two to reconcile

This distinction matters because it illuminates a trap we can easily fall into. The trap goes like this: if I cannot reconcile with my mother, it must be because I have not forgiven her enough. If I had truly let go of my anger, the relationship would heal. The healing is therefore my responsibility, and the failure of it is evidence of my own incomplete inner work.

This logic keeps some of us trying for decades. It is also, importantly, not how forgiveness or reconciliation actually work. You can forgive and still find that reconciliation is not available. Reconciliation requires two.

When the other person cannot acknowledge what has happened, cannot take responsibility, cannot participate in the kind of mutual reckoning that true reconciliation requires, then, reconciliation is not on the table.

Mother’s Day when there can only be forgiveness

You can keep loving them. You can keep hoping. You can keep adjusting your own approach. But what we cannot do, no matter how hard or how long we try, is reconcile a relationship by ourselves.

This is one of the harder things to accept, especially if we grew up being taught that our job in the relationship was to manage, to anticipate, to make things smoother. Decades of practice of being the responsible one in the dynamic makes us believe that with enough effort, enough understanding, enough cleverness, we can make the relationship work.

The realization that no amount of effort on just one side can make a two-sided thing happen, is tough to swallow. Our mind keeps insisting, up until the day or the event that our body finally tells us, ‘enough.’

When it’s less than perfect, there’s a physical toll

Certainly, there’s a toll, both physical and emotional, to years of trying to make something work that was not going to work. Our bodies, as some of us only learn in midlife, often tell us something is happening long before our mind is willing to admit it.

Our chronic vigilance, the repeated disappointment, the ongoing emotional toll of a relationship that does not do its part can damage us, sometimes severely.

The long work of arriving at the realization

The path to accepting that a relationship cannot be repaired is rarely linear, and it is almost never quick. Most of us who arrive at this point have been on the journey for years, sometimes decades, without realizing that’s what we were on. We were just trying. Reading the books. Adjusting the boundaries. Going to therapy. Hoping the next visit, the next phone call, the next family event would be different.

There is a particular pattern that tends to repeat: an attempt to engage, a brief period of optimism, a familiar collapse, a period of recovery, and then, eventually, another attempt. The cycle can run for decades.

Each iteration ends with a slightly more accurate understanding of what is actually possible, but also with the persistent hope that this time will be different. Hope is one of the most stubborn things, particularly when it comes to the people we love or once loved or wanted to love.

It can be a moment or a realization that changes everything

Sometimes it takes a single, dramatic event or conversation for us to come to attention. Sometimes it isn’t. More often, it’s a growing accumulation that’s suddenly too much to shoulder. A particular conversation that lands differently than usual. A pattern that, after the hundredth iteration, finally becomes visible as a pattern. A moment of catching yourself preparing for the same disappointment you have prepared for many times before, and realizing you no longer have the resources for it.

The arrival at acceptance is often less a decision than a recognition. Something that has been getting clearer for a long time but only now becomes undeniable.

I do not think the length of time it took us to get here is evidence of our poor judgment. It’s evidence of how much we wanted the relationship to be different, how seriously we took the cultural and personal weight of the bond, and how much we were willing to carry before the realization we simply cannot do it anymore.

The grief, the relief, and the guilt about the relief

So what’s it feel like to realize that a primary relationship cannot be repaired? Almost everyone who has been through it describes something layered rather than singular. The grief is the most visible part. Grief for the relationship you wished you’d had, for the mother you needed and didn’t get, for the version of your life that would have been possible if things had been different.

But underneath or alongside the grief, I think we can often feel something else, and this part can be even trickier. Relief. The relief of not having to try anymore. The relief of putting down the work of managing, anticipating, hoping. The relief of acknowledging out loud, even if only to yourself, what you have known for a long time.

Relief isn’t a sign that you didn’t, or don’t still, love the person. It is a sign that the work of trying to make something work that wasn’t going to work was costing you more than you could bear.

Mother’s Day without the guilt

Of course, then we probably begin feeling the guilt about our relief. After all, we’re supposed to feel only sadness, never relief, when it comes to a mother. There’s a voice, and sometimes other people that will say to us that our ‘relief’ is monstrous. It confirms what you have always feared about yourself: you are cold, that you are not a good daughter or son, that you are choosing yourself over a person you owe a debt to that you can never fully repay. This voice can be loud and difficult to recognize as being a voice, not a verdict.

Maybe it takes all three of these things: the grief, the relief, and the guilt about the relief to come to acceptance.

Experts say it’s sometimes this ability to hold contradictory truths at once that leads us to acceptance. Yes, you love/d her. Yes, the relationship hurt you. Yes, you wish things could have been different. Yes, you are relieved to have stopped trying. None of these cancel out the others.

What the freedom actually contains when things are less than perfect

If you have arrived at this acceptance, or are arriving at it, the question of what comes next is its own thing. The cultural script that didn’t have a category for the unrepairable relationship also doesn’t have one for the life that follows accepting it. We are, in some ways, in unscripted territory.

What I can tell you, from my own experience and from the experience of many people I have spoken to about this, is that the freedom on the other side of acceptance is not the dramatic, expansive freedom you might expect. It is more practical. It is the freedom of energy that is no longer going into the trying.

It’s energy that can now go into your own life, your own relationships, your own creative or professional or personal work. It is the freedom of no longer organizing your inner weather around what the next phone call might bring. It is the freedom of being able to be fully present in the rest of your life, because you are not constantly half-deployed in an effort that was never going to succeed.

When it’s less than perfect you can give yourself permission

There is also a particular permission that arrives with acceptance: permission to make decisions about your own life that you had been deferring. About how you spend Mother’s Day. About what contact, if any, makes sense for you to maintain. About what you tell other people, and how, and when. About what part of yourself you are no longer willing to set aside in service of a relationship that has not been able to hold it.

None of these decisions are easy. But they become possible in a way they were not possible before, when every choice was being made in the shadow of an outcome you were still trying to produce.

I suspect the grief will not go away. Mother’s Day will probably continue to be a complicated week for the rest of my and possibly your life. And it’s not just Mother’s Day. There will also be birthdays, anniversaries, the days of the year that hold particular weight in our particular history. The acceptance does not eliminate the loss; it just changes what we have decided we are willing to carry.

When it’s less than perfect we can choose loss over pain

If you are reading this and recognizing yourself, know that what you are carrying is real. The grief is real. The relief is real. The guilt about the relief is real, and so is the freedom underneath all of it. None of these contradict each other. They are simply what it looks like to accept a hard truth about a relationship you would have given almost anything to have differently.

Whatever this Mother’s Day looks like for you, whether you mark it, ignore it, dread it, get through it quietly with the people who are family by choice, give yourself a little more permission than you did last year. The day will keep arriving. You get to decide what to do with it.

That, after everything, is something.