When Mothers Day is Complicated

This is an adaptation of my weekly newsletter, Adventures Big & Small. If you want to receive emails like these, click here to subscribe.

I had this written for Mother’s Day, but I got cold feet.

Mother’s Day is complex around our house, as I know it is for so many people. I think as a society we’re still (and likely will always be) feeling our way through the concepts of gender, parenting, motherhood, and fatherhood.

But I realized this morning that I was acting out of fear. Fear that I would misstep. Fear that I would be misunderstood.

I don’t think that this kind of fear helps anyone. I would rather take that risk and have a conversation and open myself to your thoughts. These newsletters are as much about learning as they are about sharing.

How does this land for you? I would love to know.

Three of my closest friends (my wife being one of them) lost their mothers within the past few years. All three of those people are now parents to children of their own. The one who lost their mom most recently also has a toddler who just finished a year of chemotherapy and is now returning to health. You can imagine what a weird day it was for her.

I think a lot of people have mixed feelings about this well-intentioned holiday. We live in a part of the country that thankfully embraces a diverse range of love and parenting. I’ve seen so many beautiful versions of “motherhood” through the lens of my camera.

But while it is easy to uwaveringly dislike something, I sense that my friends aren’t quite ready to throw out Mother’s Day entirely. And I wonder if it’s because there is a piece of it they value – it’s just hard to figure out exactly what, or how it applies to us.

On Sunday I found myself thinking about the idea of motherhood. About how it relates to those masculine and feminine elements that seem like common threads throughout so many ancient and indigenous cultures. Are they maybe the yin and yang of parenting? Not directly related to gender or to a specific parental role but to an energy. Not to who is caring for us but to how they are doing it right now.

Maybe Mother’s Day is about celebrating that way of caring. It does not have to come from a mother or a person who identifies as female. It does not have to come from the same person always. It can come from anyone or anywhere that has the capacity to be slow and soft and nurturing.

This might be one parent today. It might be another, or a grandparent, tomorrow. It might be the way you care for a child but it also might be the way you care for a friend. It might be Mother Earth.

Mother’s Day still feels complex. But this year my thoughts came together into something that helped me make sense of how it felt around our house.

To help take something beautiful from it.

I hope you feel the same. And if not, please share. I have so much to learn.