There's No Card for This

Welp, it’s almost Mother’s Day.

If you have an uncomplicated relationship to mothers and motherhood, I’m so happy for you! I hope you have a great Mother’s Day!

But if this holiday is really hard for you, or if it’s a complex mixture of great and awful, I feel you. There are so many ways our relationship with motherhood or non-motherhood can be complicated. There are so many ways our relationships with our own mothers can be complicated. All those dynamics can rise to the surface and swirl around simultaneously on this day, and for many of us, it’s just a lot.

Last week, Ryan Rose Weaver interviewed me for her lovely newsletter about kinship and mindfulness, In Tending, and we started to crack open some of the complexities.

This week, we continued the conversation through a Substack Live (video above) in which we explored Auntie Bulletin readers’ responses to the recent Complicated Mother’s Day survey. I was so impressed with the wisdom and insight of readers’ responses, which were lovely and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

On the Many Complications of Mother’s Day

Lisa: Welcome! We are coming up on Mother's Day, which is a complicated day for many of us. With me today is Ryan Rose Weaver, who has written very compellingly about what she calls Complicated Mother's Day.

Ryan: We have so many points of connection, which is one reason why we wanted to do this today. One of those points is creating spaces where people who do all kinds of care work can come together and talk about what we have in common.

I am a parent to a living child, but I also, as you said, know what it's like to be building a family, trying, it's not happening, but also to have really beautiful, meaningful relationships with other people's children. When I set out to create a newsletter aimed at creating a space for caregivers to talk to each other and to go inward as well, to be whole people, it felt really important to make it more of a big tent experience rather than to say, "this is a newsletter about motherhood."

No disrespect to people who are focused on that particular identity, but that's not my path and that's not my social circle. I am an Auntie surrounded by Aunties, as you are. So it's really a privilege to come and talk about this.

Even though I know that Mother's Day can bring up some not-so-happy feelings for many of us, I'm really happy to be here in a space where we can actually talk about it. Sometimes it's very stigmatized to talk about the more troubling or the less inclusive aspects of the day. So many of us feel that pain and think we're the only ones, but we're not. It's an act of self-compassion to say “this hurts,” but also to ask, “who else feels this?”

Lisa: What we're going to talk about is a survey I did recently at The Auntie Bulletin where I asked readers—both parents, aunties, all kinds of alloparents, foster parents, step parents, grandparents, godparents, friends of the family—to talk about what makes Mother's Day complicated for them.

All these people responded with really lovely and heart-wrenching stories about the things that make Mother's Day difficult for so many of us. I wanted somebody to come talk with me about those, and I felt like Ryan was the perfect person.

We're going to see how many of those we can get through, hoping that at the end of this Substack Live, you'll be able to come away knowing that you're not alone, regardless of your experience with Mother's Day or what Ryan calls "complicated Mother's Day." I've started calling it "complicated Mother's Day" kind of routinely now based on your work, Ryan.

We're going to try to surface all the different stories that come up around Mother's Day that are outside of the stories about a happy, simple, straightforward Mother's Day. And then at the end we'll talk about Ryan's lovely insights on how to take some agency over the day and form your own rituals.

Somebody who responded to the Auntie Bulletin Complicated Mother's Day survey said:

I never wanted to be a mother myself, but I would desperately love to be an aunt, a cousin, a part of a warm and caring family, but there's no card for that.

And so we're going to get into all the different ways that there might not be a card for your experience or my experience. What do you want to say, Ryan, before we launch into these?

Ryan: "There's no card for that" is such an important part of this day. Every Mother's Day I walk down the aisle and I read the messages that are inside all of the cards, even for my own mother. And they don't fit. They just don't fit.

My own personal mothering experience was that I was primarily raised by a wonderful paternal grandmother. I'm so lucky to have had that. My parents really struggled throughout my childhood. And so, even just messages like "you've always been there for me" - it's like, I really love my mom, and that's not necessarily always been true.

Pink is for moms, apparently!

I think it's really important to witness each other because of, as one person who responded called it, the "capitalistic framing" of this day. I think it's an important act of resistance to step outside a framing that's been imposed on our stories and to author our own.

On the Mother’s Day “Honorary Mention”

Lisa: Should we read a few of these examples from the survey? There was a wide range of different ways that people reported Mother's Day being complicated. One of the big demographics that reads the Auntie Bulletin are people who don't themselves have children and have other kinds of relationships to the children in their lives than as a parent. So there's a lot of people who wrote about feelings of non-belonging on Mother's Day, even though they do a lot of care work in their life.

I don't know about y’all listening to this call, or Ryan, before you had kids, or maybe even while you have kids, there’ll be people who, after they say “Happy Mother's Day,” and they talk about how great Mother's Day is, then they'll throw in, "… and also all the other people who are not mothers."

Another person called this the "honorary mention," which is the way that I keep thinking about it. She wrote:

These days I have more mixed feelings if a friend texts me that to her I'm a mother too, because, as she puts it, “you have the heart of a mother.” I'll receive the vulnerability and warmth of that message with open arms, but I will still feel like the underlying thinking is something I get tired of. I do miss getting celebrated every now and then for what I am. I guess I wish there was an Auntie day or a Brave Team Leader's day or an Ecologist Enthusiast's Day."

I just feel like these ideas are so rich around the appreciation that people are going out of their way to include those of us who are not mothers in Mother's Day. And then also this feeling of - do I love this? Is this what I want?

Ryan: I think part of the pain of Mother's Day is that it highlights things that you would like to have and don't, at the same time as it maybe does include you or touch you with a kind of gentle outreached hand. I think it just shows the sort of "can't win" position that we put Aunties in, and that we sometimes put our loved ones in when we're in that sort of in-between place when things aren't resolved in us.

It's impossible to expect somebody else or our community to resolve something for us that we haven't resolved inside of ourselves. It's just kind of a "living the questions" kind of space to be in.

Lisa: I think that's really well put. I feel like personally, as an Auntie to a lot of children and as a godmother, I really appreciate it when people reach out to me on Mother's Day and say, "Thank you for all that you do. I really, really appreciate you." But also, when I was going through infertility, it was much more fraught to hear that. I think it so depends on what season we're in in our lives.

And I appreciate, Ryan, your point that it kind of puts our loved ones in a tricky position because they can't necessarily know unless we are good at communicating, which a lot of times these things are hard to communicate about, like where we're at with it and whether we want to hear it or not. It's hard for us to even know whether we want to hear it or not.

On Getting Flowers for the Wrong Reason

Ryan: Absolutely. And then there are those unscripted moments where if you're a woman of a certain age and you just have the audacity to be out in public buying your groceries or something, somebody might wish you a happy Mother's Day without knowing your story. It's completely well-intentioned, and it's also usually gutting. I can tell my story about that if you would like now, or we can save it for later.

Lisa Sibbett: Do it now. It's such a good and heart-wrenching story.

Ryan Rose Weaver: So as Lisa mentioned at the top, I facilitate perinatal loss groups and have spent a long time in the infertility world. And this is one of those stories that we call a "terrible treasure box" story where when you're with people that really understand what you're going through, you're like, "Look at this. Can I tell you this?"

My experience was that there was a year where I had surgery for my endometriosis and was in the beginning stages of kicking the tires and doing IVF. So really, really raw. I had spent almost the entire year just getting poked and prodded.

The break in the clouds for me was this time of year - my birthday is in May, and I was also graduating from Bank Street, which is where I got my teaching degrees. So we decided to have a party in our tiny backyard in Queens. I was so excited because here was an opportunity to step into these identities that weren't about motherhood, where my friends and family were just there to celebrate me because I exist, which is allowed, actually. Once you're older than 30, you can actually just be worth celebrating because you exist.

We were also celebrating my professional accomplishments. It makes me think of the person that said, "Where's the ecology enthusiast's day?" I was like, I got two master’s degrees, where is that card in the card aisle? It was a huge accomplishment that was tied to my expertise and my wisdom as a caregiver, because at that point I'd been teaching for many years. It was like I got my "A+ nurturer" piece of paper, and we were there to celebrate.

We were all having a good time. The apartment was full of people. There was a knock on the door and this guy handed me some flowers and he said, "Happy Mother's Day." And he didn't bother to look at the note inside. I don't remember whether the flowers were for my birthday or for my graduation, but they certainly weren't for Mother's Day. But again, he just saw a woman who's over 30 getting flowers in May — you know, what else could she possibly be worth celebrating for?

And I think it just sort of underscores this message that we send to women that they're second-class citizens unless they are a mother, no matter what else they accomplish. And I think that that is just straight-up patriarchal bullshit.

That moment really sucked. He might as well have handed me like a big bag of dog shit and just been like, "Here you go. Happy birthday." It was like he shot an arrow right into my Achilles heel. So it hurts, you know, and it feels like I just can completely understand and connect with this feeling of like, “when am I going to get my flowers for me, for what I am, and not for what I'm adjacent to?”

Lisa: That's interesting, Ryan, because when you told me that story originally, I had assumed that the flower delivery person had a bunch of flowers for Mother's Day that they had just misdelivered to the wrong house. But in fact, they were delivering flowers to you and just assuming that the flowers were for Mother's Day, which is so much worse.

Ryan: I was getting celebrated, he just couldn't think of a reason why that would be that didn't have to do with motherhood.

Lisa Sibbett: Ugh.

On Having to Choose Between Mother Figures

Here's another crappy thing that happens on Mother's Day — we heard about in the survey — is people who have to choose between different moms or different mother figures.

We heard from somebody who was talking about being maybe estranged from their mother, but certainly having a very complicated relationship with their own mother. This person wrote:

Celebrating the other mothers in my life is seen as terrible due to my own mother being alive. I have multiple mothers in my life who are more a mother to me than mine ever was. But wishing them Happy Mother's Day is interpreted as a slight to my biological mother who I have no real relationship with.

I feel like that's a story that we hear a lot of time in the queer community, but doesn't necessarily have to be a story for queer people. It can happen to a lot of people. It just sucks.

And there was this other person who wrote — this is a rough one, I hadn't even thought about what this would be like. This person wrote:

I have two moms and they separated when I was six. Each year, I'd calculate the weekends to see who I'd spend Mother's Day with. In class, I'd either take extra time to make two of whatever Mother's Day craft we did, or have to choose which mom to give it to. It never felt like just a celebration, but instead a chance to let one of them down in some way. And then when one of my moms married my stepmother, the choice of whether to acknowledge her as a mother was agonizing. I never wanted a third parent. We've always clashed pretty intensely over her so-called parenting. She never wanted to be a parent. And Mother's Day always highlighted how different my family was.

And I just feel like the card aisle really normalizes the nuclear family and the heteronormative family and doesn't even imagine the possibility that there are young people, or people of any age, who are put in a position of like, “which parent am I supposed to be celebrating right now?” And especially if those parents have strong feelings about it, what a hard position to be put in year after year after year.

Ryan: I have questions about that one as a teacher. That's a really hard thing to ask a small child to juggle, or even a teenager, you know? I do think this is why part of education has to be about normalizing from the very beginning this idea that family can look all kinds of different ways. And I think as teachers, we need to be more curious about what's really true for our students.

What stood out to me from that is also that there was the presence of the stepmom. And I know that you heard from step-parents as well that on this day they sort of feel like either they get an honorable mention or it feels fraught for them or they're not recognized.

On Stepmother Invisibility

Lisa: Let me read a couple of the things that stepmothers said, because those really have stuck with me. One person said:

I'm a stepmom, and Mother's Day is constructed to be all about “real moms.” My stepdaughter obviously spends it with her mom and would never think of acknowledging me as part of Mother's Day. Her mom has maintained very strict boundaries around her mom role and denies that I have a significant role in her daughter's life. Mother's Day is just a reminder of the dysfunctional dynamics and unacknowledged physical and emotional labor wrapped up in my stepmom role.

Other people wish me Happy Mother's Day thinking they're being inclusive, and I want to explain to them that the whole concept of Mother's Day is exclusionary in a way that denies the full scope of women's and everyone's caregiving roles, but I know I just have to smile and say thank you.

And there's one other I want to read.

I'm a stepmother who sacrifices a ton for many stepkids, but I've never received acknowledgement on Mother's Day. Everyone I know seems to have kids of their own who go big on Mother's Day. I avoid social media the whole week, so I don't have to see it. If you have a stepmom, she's not your bio mom, but give her a hug anyway. You have no idea what it's like.

Ryan Rose Weaver: Those dynamics can be really challenging. If you're a kid and you're trying to juggle your biological mom, a stepmother figure, and the complicated marital dynamics of that.

You read the piece that I wrote a couple of years ago about this. It was inspired by an interview I did with a friend of mine who actually, her stepmother was sort of her chosen mother. And she lost both. And it was really interesting to see the assumptions that people made about how she must feel, or how they didn't know what to say. In all of these cases, there's a framing that's being imposed on somebody's story and it feels almost like violence that they have to accept it. Like, “yes, that's my life,” even if it's not true.

I think we're overlooking the opportunity to ask the people in our lives, what meaning do you make out of this? What's the story you tell yourself about your caregiving capacity and where you fit into the larger village that you inhabit? And how does this day make you feel? And what does help?

And just sort of like draw people out and then affirm the language that they use to talk about it and then just show up for them in the ways that they ask, and if they aren't sure like make a few suggestions. It’s just like any other grief, right? So if we know how to show up for people in grief, then we know how to show up for people on Mother's Day.

Lisa: Some people wrote about, I don't think I pulled the quotation, but I had a few different people write in the survey about the way that Mother's Day is supposed to be a certain way. There are these traditions around Mother's Day and a lot of people are kind of rigid around those traditions. As in, it involves flowers and it involves brunch and we're going to do this kind of thing and not that kind of thing. And so there's not, especially in some families, very little room for actually having these open-ended conversations about what do we want and, you know, who should be acknowledged on this day? And do we even like this day? And what should be the rituals?

You're going to talk more about this later, Ryan, about how we can kind of like reclaim some agency over it. But I think it's really just worth naming how much the rigidity around the Hallmark cards and the rituals and the expectations can make the day much harder than it needs to be.

I'm also thinking about in this in the situation of stepmoms. On the one hand, I have a number of friends who are moms who are divorced, and I can totally understand where they're coming from — that they want that day to be their day. And then I also recognize that, certainly this is not the case in every heterosexual marriage, but in a lot of heterosexual marriages, when the kids are with the dad, that dynamic ends up being that the stepmom is doing a lot of the actual labor. Although I have never been in a step-parent position, I can really see how complicated that is. What a good example of complicated Mother's Day.

Ryan: That emotional labor deserves flowers. My parents divorced, and my dad very often had a girlfriend throughout my childhood. And I mean, she was the one that made sure there was food on the table. She intervened on my behalf when he was being — well, he's a cranky old cowboy from Utah. So there were some moments when I was a teenager. And, you know, these are gestures of mothering.

And yet, I don't think anybody ever even invited me to recognize her in that way. In some ways it's the same domestic labor issue that any heterosexual couple has, right? She's just doing what she was expected to do. Why should she get flowers for it? Maybe I'll send her some flowers on Sunday, that particular girlfriend.

On Auntie Invisibility

Lisa: Speaking of “no appreciation necessary” or people who are invisible and often not talked about, let's talk about Auntie invisibility for a second here. A number of people wrote about being Aunties—and at the Auntie Bulletin, I define Aunties very expansively, not just as your parent's sister, but as any adult in the life of a child who isn't biologically the parent, but who is a significant adult. So that includes a whole range of people that researchers call alloparents.

And a lot of people wrote in about this, not surprisingly, because I write The Auntie Bulletin, so lots and lots of Aunties read it. One person wrote:

As an auntie who's not a parent, by choice and by circumstance, I'm so exhausted by the cultural narrative that raising children is the most glorious, important work in the world, and that non-parents will never touch the depth of love that parents feel for their children. Of course, parenting is a beautiful, hard, and life-changing endeavor. It just doesn't benefit anyone to create these comparisons. And I wish there were more opportunities to recognize the contributions that childless people make to our communities.

Ryan, I know you had a strong reaction to this one. So what comes up for you as a parent?

Ryan: When I was trying to become a parent, that stuff drove me up the wall because in terms of like actual number of children whose lives I had impacted at that point, it was more than most of the parents I'd met.

And being the parent of a living child and having taught many, many children, a lot of the feelings are the same. The difference is that you go home at night from your job. I don't know that the 24-7 mess of parenting necessarily changes qualitatively what that love is. There are definitely different levels of responsibility that can change the quality of that relationship.

I really, really, really would encourage anyone who identifies as a feminist to get curious about their motivations if they're gatekeeping love in a way that some women can access and some women cannot access. Or gatekeeping a sense of deep understanding of life's ultimate truths. Because I don't think that serves anyone. The hierarchy certainly doesn't serve anyone.

And to this particular Auntie's point, there are a lot of kinds of love that I can't participate in precisely because I am a parent. I cannot, for example, do as much activism as I used to. I can't spend as much time with my elderly neighbors the way that you do. And it changed even how much energy I can give to my teaching.

And so I think that this sort of stereotype of the child-free person is like, "Oh, they have so much time to travel and see the world." And it's like, yeah, but they also have the opportunity to see different kinds of love and participate in different kinds of love right where they are in ways that people who are parents don't get to. So in addition to being able to like, go see the Great Wall of China, if that's what you want to do, you also get to see different aspects of the way that love lives in your community because you are not a parent.

And to say that that's somehow inferior because it's different, I just completely reject the premise of that. Love is love.

Lisa: One of the things that I find hard is this very strong binary in our society between parents and non-parents. The author Ruby Warrington writes about this as the "mommy binary," where we're either parents who theoretically feel this abundant love and meaning and joy in parenthood—which, of course that story is much more complicated—or we are child-free people who, like you said Ryan, are spending a lot of time traveling and doing expensive hobbies. There was a Simpsons episode where there's a child-free woman who does skydiving massages and different kinds of ridiculous made-up hobbies that cost a lot of money.

So what I really want to do, and I know you do too, Ryan, is trouble that binary and think about the ways that alloparents and parents are all actually part of the same team that are caring for the people who need care in our communities, in our village — just in different forms.

On Involuntary Childlessness and Mother’s Day

Now, the person whose quotation I just read about Auntie invisibility also talked about not being able to have children, and that's another group of people for whom Mother's Day is just such a hard time. Certainly was the case for me when I was going through multiple pregnancy losses back to back. So I want to read a couple of quotations from that.

One person said:

My long journey of not being able to conceive makes Mother's Day each year a painful day. Each time the day passes, it's a reminder that I have had another year of being childless and a year less of being a mother.

Another person said, just very simply:

Four miscarriages, no answers.

To which I respond, me too.

Another person said:

I don't have children. I wanted children. I tried for years and endured a pregnancy loss and three rounds of IVFs. I've tried to do Mother's Day in all the ways one could. Ignore, feel blessed by my mother. Hide, feel lucky to have a mother-in-law I enjoy. Hide and hide. I mostly cringe and hide. If I have not been tending to my grief on being childless, it will meet me at some point on Mother's Day.

Ryan: "If I have not been tending to my grief, it will meet me." Yeah, I really feel that. Me too. It's not fair to be in a position that you didn't choose.

Lisa: I told you this story, Ryan, about a day when I was pregnant and I was going through pregnancy loss after pregnancy loss. So I was living in abject terror that I was going to lose this pregnancy — which I did.

I was at a gathering with a bunch of women and there was a woman there who was pregnant, maybe like six or seven months along and just so excited. And everybody was talking about, you know, it was her first child. Like, where's the kid going to sleep? And are you going to do co-sleeping? And have you bought the car seat yet? And do you feel ready? And what are you going to name the child? And, you know, how's the kid's other parent feeling? And just sort of having all these conversations that we have when we're expecting children.

And to be clear, I find those conversations very joyful usually, and I participate in them routinely. But at that time in my life, when I was pregnant and trying like hell to hold that pregnancy inside my body, but not having control over it, that was so hard because I wanted in that moment to just be able to say, "I'm pregnant too," and have everybody be excited for me and wrap around me and be so excited for my child. But instead, I had to hold that inside, not say anything, try to pretend like everything was normal. And it was just brutal.

People who are unable to have children, who are trying to have children, they have to deal with experiences like that all the time. Mother's Day is maybe one of the hardest days like that, but actually it's all the time.

Ryan: We can put that story in the terrible treasure box.

There's so many layers to that. There's the experience of recurrent miscarriage, which is really challenging and really changes you. And there's the experience of knowing that if you are to become pregnant or are currently pregnant, that it was hard for you, but it was a journey that you fought for. It can be very difficult to be in spaces next to people who are like, "We weren't even trying!"

Lisa: “I just sneezed and I got pregnant!”

Ryan: I was trying to scale this mountain with my fingernails and the helicopter just like dropped you off.

Lisa: Oh, you're having twins? Wow.

Ryan: Just the experience of this being so hard for me, like being around easeful experiences of pregnancy or celebratory experiences of pregnancy feels as though that in and of itself is invalidating of what your experience has been.

I think that you're identifying is a center of gravity that we take for granted, where it's like parents of living children are in the center and people who are pregnant are closer to that. And then everyone else is sort of on the edges, and the attention needs to tip downward to the center. And if a parent shows up in the conversation and wants to talk about their children, we all have to like sit back.

But I would trouble that. I facilitate perinatal loss groups and we very frequently talk about what would it be like to center yourself because you're grieving. What would it be like to put yourself at the center and to think about how your feelings matter on this day?

We can talk about the framework that I use to think about reclaiming days that are hard like this. I work with people who have been through a recurrent loss, have been through termination for medical reasons, have gone through endless rounds of IVF, and then have lost a pregnancy. Often the people I work with have lost a late pregnancy, right? Like they've been six months pregnant, had those happy, assumptive conversations, and then lost the pregnancy.

It can be really challenging to make it through days like this or to make it through what would have been your due date. So we do a lot of pre-planning in those groups to help people think about how they're going to do it. So would it be helpful if I spoke on that and gave some ideas? Is there anything else that we want to talk about from the survey first that we need to kind of bring in?

Lisa: I wonder if we want to wait and think about reclaiming the rituals until after we've talked about the data from the people who are parents.

Ryan: That would be a good way to close. I think so too. And I think that honestly [turning toward parents for this part of the conversation] is not necessarily a recentering of parents, based on what I know of your data. It really proves the point that we're making which is that it's not like when you become pregnant or have a living child, you cross some sort of Rubicon where everything is easeful and everything is fixed. It introduces new tensions and struggles that are hard.

Lisa: At the Auntie Bulletin, I think it’s important for us to have conversations as people who do not have kids amongst ourselves about what that's like. But I also think that conversation between parents and non-parents is essential. And I also think that parenting is beautiful. It is. It's very demanding and it is many times very magical. I mean, it is a really important part, a hugely important part of human experience, one of the most intense parts of human experience.

So parenting is definitely not outside the bounds of what we're talking about, but a lot of what people wrote about who are parents was relationships with their own mothers, and boy is that something that can make Mother's Day complicated. So let's talk about that.

On Complicated Relationships with Mothers

I'm going to read a couple quotations from people who have really hard relationships with their mothers. Somebody said:

It's a day that lately has been driving home that my mother wasn't and isn't able to be a caring mother who sees me as a person, in large part because her mother and her grandmother also could not treat their daughters with love and respect. Because the history of mothers in my family is one of brokenness, abuse, control, and pain, I also had no mother figures growing up. I am motherless with a living mom and aunts, and it feels like even as I try to build chosen family, there's nothing to build on.

That one really gets me, I think it's really important. I really appreciate how this person is acknowledging that this is a generational thing that gets passed down through generations. And I am fortunate, very fortunate — Ryan, we were joking before the call started about like, “must be nice to have a really well-adjusted, lovely mom.” And I am fortunate to be one of those people.

But I think it's so important to acknowledge that for those of us who have difficult people in our family, which I certainly do, a lot of times that didn't start with that person, but it came from the generation before and the generation before that and the generation before that, generation before that.

Both Ryan and I come to our thinking about care and family from a kind of mindfulness and Buddhist orientation, thinking about a wheel of karma that has been spinning back through the generations, maybe for tens or hundreds of generations. So much of that stuff is outside of our control. But on Mother's Day, it doesn't really feel like it matters. It's just like, “hey, it would be nice to have a mom that I could rely on and who likes me!”

Another person wrote:

I love her, but I don't like her. Her neglect of her own mental health was why she was abusive. When her stress levels increased or mental health worsened, the abuse worsened. Hard to celebrate a mom like that on Mother's Day.

Ryan: It underscores the importance of alloparents in being cycle breakers alongside parents. So much harm is done because caregivers are unsupported in their mental health and their physical health. They're just overwhelmed. And so to the extent that we'd have strong villages, we can also start to create different causes and conditions for the next generation such that caregivers feel held. And so the kids feel held too.

Lisa: I think that's exactly right. The work of all caregivers is to try to bequeath a little bit better future to the people who come after us than what we received, in so many different domains.

On Losing Your Mom

A lot of people really have a hard time with Mother's Day because their mom died. This person wrote:

My mom passed away before my second child. My much-wanted and long-waited-for daughter was born. Every Mother's Day, I'm reminded of how much my mom would have loved her, and I miss her not only for myself, but for my daughter who never got to know her.

That sucks.

Ryan: So hard. These missed connections and broken connections between generations, too, don't fit the Mother’s Day narrative.

Lisa Sibbett: It's so hard when you lose somebody for them to not be there for those milestones, like a new baby, but also like a wedding — any things that you imagined that person was going to be there for.

Another person wrote about her mom passing away unexpectedly in 2016 in her early 60s. This person says:

It was just a heartbreaking, life changing rupture and loss. Mother’s Days since then have been hard. At first I tried to avoid the constant advertisements and sale emails, which turned out to be nearly impossible. The last year or two I have tried to reframe it to celebrate all the moms in my life, not just my own. I call my friends who are moms and tell them how proud I am of them. This year I think I’ll deliver little flower bouquets to the moms in my life. I think knowing that I’m doing this would make my mom really happy too.

Ryan: Oh, I love that — being the hands of your mother in the world.

You have the best readers.

Lisa: Right?? Auntie Bulletin readers are amazing.

I'm going to read one more, and this is actually from a friend of mine. She wrote about being adopted and never getting to meet her birth mom. She said:

I never had kids of my own to bond with in that way that's celebrated on Mother's Day. I'm just now in my late 50s coming to terms with the trauma of being whisked away from my mom when I was born. I'm grateful that I know who she was and quite a bit about her, but I miss her terribly. There are so many things I want to ask her, so many stories I want to hear. I'm sad I never got to hold her hand, even once. Mother-daughter relationships are kind of iconic in most cultures. There's a lot of assumptions on this holiday that I don't fit into, and that's hard.

Ryan: That image of not even being able to hold her hand — it's really eloquent and, as you said, really heart-wrenching.

Reclaiming Agency on Mother's Day

Lisa: I've got two more little stories to read, and I think maybe that'll pivot us toward, Ryan, you have so much great wisdom about kind of how we can rethink Mother's Day and reclaim some agency around days like this.

This person said:

There's a pressure to have a certain kind of day that feels more performative than authentic. Conceptually, I like the idea of celebrating all mothers, caregivers, and maternal figures. But in practice, it's really hard to get a brunch reservation. Everyone's trying to please you, but you're also trying to please your own mothers. It's really not that fun at all. I've been thinking about how to have a different kind of day.

And then on that subject of having a different kind of day, another person wrote:

I’m going to be proactive and plan a family gathering at a baseball game on Mother's Day and invite all the people I know who also have a complicated Mother's Day, which I tend to think as most people whether they admit it or not.

I really love that idea of having a gathering for people who have a complicated Mother's Day. That's really, really sharp.

Now I want to hand it over to you, Ryan. You had agreed to talk to us a little bit about all the ideas that arise in your perinatal loss groups about how to rethink this kind of day and hopefully, if not make it a little less painful, but at least provide some healing for ourselves around this day.

Ryan: I think it's just about claiming agency in a world where we are not in control of everything and being intentional in a non-sort of cliche mindfulness way, but really like we're choosing our choices here on Mother's Day. We don't have to collaborate in a framing being imposed on our lives and on our stories that doesn't feel true for us and that's harming us. We don't have to do that.

One of the ways that we think about this when I'm talking to people who have lost pregnancies is even if they don't have Mother's Day coming up, they do have a due date. We tend to have people joining us in the perinatal loss group after their loss and before their baby would be born. They are almost by definition headed towards a day that no longer belongs to them in the way that they thought it would.

I think that that's a really perfect analog in some ways for what Mother's Day feels like where it's like, well, other people get to have this experience and I guess I don't. There's a feeling of kind of being out in the cold.

And at the same time, most of us have some connection to love and some connection to mothering that has kept us alive. And we do want to honor that, and the same with people who have lost babies. So there's love and there's grief, and how do you create a day that holds both?

Sometimes, because the feelings are so huge, people feel like the day has to be huge, right? Like they're going to plant an entire botanical garden to keep themselves busy. We actually encourage people to think about how to make small rituals that can hold big feelings.

So, for example, I got a really beautiful East Fork pottery mug after I lost my daughter-to-be, and when I'm feeling sad and I'm missing her or I'm feeling like I'm not enough in some way — I'm feeling sort of a sense of severed belonging, as Tara Brach would say, I make myself something in my mug and I drink it.

The moment that I spend with those feelings is only as long as it takes me to finish a cup of coffee, which is not very long, let's be real. But I feel so good knowing that instead of running from those feelings and sort of orphaning them, I've been able to gather them up and tend to them. And that makes me feel really resilient and it doesn't take very long. It's not that much effort.

Another prompt that I really love that came from Jess Van Wyn, who I've written about on In Tending. She is a co-facilitator of mine. She invites people just to think about the rituals that you already have in your day — your shower, your drive, your walk to work, the thing you do when you get home, the ways that you move and bring movement to your life.

Can you take those things that you're already doing and allow those pre-existing containers to hold the feelings? So for example, we know you're going to take a shower probably. Maybe, maybe not. But let's say you're going to take a shower on Mother's Day. You know, shower cries are the best and also shower oranges. So if you would rather feel joyful in the shower and not cry, you can eat a really cold orange in the shower. And just like that moment of just contrast and nurturing can be a really sweet way to honor the “both/and.”

So just thinking about your day and where your grief and your love can live. We also talk a lot about giving yourself permission to RSVP yes to things where you'd ordinarily say no, like something fun, like a child-free wedding, or like conversely, giving yourself permission to RSVP no to things where you'd ordinarily say yes, like somebody's baby shower around Mother's Day.

You don't have to go to that. I'm writing you a permission slip. You are excused, because if this is a time where you're grieving, then you deserve to be at the center of that experience. People who have lost somebody in a very real sense, we understand that it's a hard time for them and they're not going to like be going and doing all of the things. And so it's okay just to acknowledge, like, this is a time of grief for me and I need to just go inward.

I also know that sometimes we can't get out of stuff or we know that it's just going to be like a bigger deal than we really would like for it to be. And it's going to end up causing us more harm to say no. But then maybe there are still ways you can claim agency within that experience. So if you're going to go do something that you don't particularly want to do on Mother's Day, can you make a playlist for yourself that maybe has some other mother on it or other stories that your teenage self would have loved and can you blast it on the drive there? Can you walk or bike to the location instead and stop and just sit in the roots of a tree and let it hold you so that you do get that feeling of being held before you walk in?

And the other piece that I think is so important and that I really appreciated when it was me going through grief is can you make yourself an exit plan? Can you have a safe word or some sort of prefabricated excuse for why you need to leave and when that moment happens, whatever you anticipate might be triggering or somebody shows up at the door with flowers and says the wrong thing to you, can you give your sibling or your spouse that sort of signal, and can they help get you out of there?

All of those things are trauma-informed ways to give yourself more physical grounding and choices, give yourself more emotional grounding and choices.

This is not necessarily like an agenda where the promise is that we're going to take away all pain. Buddhist practitioners know that's not really possible anyway. But it allows you to claim some agency over what you can control and it gives you a really intentional pre-planned way for how you're going to tend the hurts that you know you will feel around the things that you can't control and you didn't choose.

I think that that ultimately does lead to just a more workable experience and a more authentic experience, rather than one where we feel like we have to go through the motions and then we're adding resentment to the list of hard feelings that we have to cope with on that day. I think we can just be gentle to ourselves.

I would also say: hot tip, do not wear mascara on Mother's Day. I don't know why I have to learn that lesson the hard way every single year, but if you can skip it, please do.

Lisa: That's a great rule of thumb for mascara, but also a nice rule of thumb for Mother's Day in general, if there's something you want to opt out of. I just really love that piece of advice that you have, Ryan, to give ourselves permission to just not do it.

Ryan: If you can get away with it, like turn your phone off and take your dog to the woods. Get yourself a romantic novel and sit in your bed eating frozen pizza. Go to the park with a bottle of rosé and your friends. If you can do those things and safely get away with it, go do those things. And if you can't, can you still bring in the spirit of that to your day?

Lisa: Well, this has been such a lovely conversation, Ryan. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about Complicated Mother's Day, a day that's just coming up in a few days.

We had a number of people join us, which is nice because we didn't really promote this very much.

If you are here because you know me and you know The Auntie Bulletin, you should definitely subscribe to In Tending. Ryan's newsletter is beautiful and supportive and wise and thoughtful. I learn a lot from it every single week. She's definitely one of my go-to wise minds here on Substack. So thank you, everybody, for being here. And Ryan, thank you again so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you.

Ryan: Thank you so much for having me. And I would echo those sentiments. I love that when I come to the Auntie Bulletin in your space, I don't have to code switch between my Auntie self and my parent self, that I can be both and that we can acknowledge that we're all on the same team. Like team cycle breaking. It is not just for parents. And I would say if you like In Tending, you will love The Auntie Bulletin!

Lisa: Thank you, everybody. A big thank you to the Auntie Bulletin readers who responded to the Complicated Mother’s Day survey. And thanks again, Ryan. We'll see you around!

Collective Wisdom Survey: Auntie Impostorship

Each month, I survey the Aunties about an issue of interest to our community. Our survey for May is about Auntie impostorship: the ways we feel like we don’t quite belong or aren’t fully legitimate members of a family, kinship circle, or community that we love. Sometimes this happens because others make us feel this way: a parent or primary guardian may signal, subtly or otherwise, that there are experiences or emotions we can’t possibly understand or parts of their family’s life where we’re not welcome. Other times, the source of our impostorship is internal: we tell ourselves stories about not quite belonging in the lives of the families we love.

Am I speaking from personal experience? Of course I am.

I’m curious: How, if at all, has Auntie impostorship shown up for you? When and where have you felt like you don’t quite belong as an Auntie or other adult in the life of kids who aren’t your own? Have others signaled your outsiderness to you? Is it a story you tell yourself? How do you navigate these experiences? And if you’ve been relatively unaffected by feelings of Auntie impostorship, what’s your secret? What have you or others done to ensure you always know you are welcome and belong, even in families that aren’t technically your own?

The Auntie Impostorship survey consists of four open-ended questions. Feel free to answer as many or as few as you like, to think outside the box, and to answer the questions you wish I’d asked rather than the ones I actually did.

I’ll be collecting your ideas for the month of May. As always, when you complete a reader survey you’ll be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin.

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Thanks for reading all the way to the end! You get the secret scoop that if you can’t afford a paid subscription due to financial hardship, you can reply to this email, shoot me a message in the Substack app, or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a 12-month paid tier subscription, no questions asked.