When Mother’s Day Brings Up Complicated Feelings
When did you first realize Mother’s Day was approaching? Perhaps a card display in the grocery store? A social media ad reminding you to order flowers? A sign in your favorite restaurant saying to book your Mother’s Day brunch before it’s too late? Perhaps you did not need a reminder. Perhaps you are well aware that Mother’s Day is right around the corner.
For many people, Mother’s Day does not arrive with only joy. It arrives with grief, ambivalence, exhaustion, and a quiet sense of dread. If you have ever scrolled past a flower delivery ad and felt a heaviness settle in rather than warmth, this post is for you.
As a registered social worker and therapist specializing in perinatal mental health, I work with people who carry all kinds of complicated feelings about this day. There’s a cultural script for Mother’s Day. This script says that Mother’s Day is always amazing; filled with love, flowers, and free of all complications. The dominant message says we should simply be excited for the chance to express the love and pride for the mothers in our lives. And, if we are mothers ourselves, we should be ready to bask in that love for ourselves.
Is it normal to have complicated feelings about Mother’s Day?
Yes! Many people find Mother’s Day really complicated and filled with mixed emotions. You may notice inner tension: part of you feels excited, and part of you feels dread. Or you mostly feel positive, but there’s also a little bit of grief, sadness, or even rage mixed in. Maybe you feel numb, or exhausted, or maybe just alone in this sense that you don’t know exactly how to feel on Mother’s Day.
It’s very normal for Mother’s Day to hold more than one meaning at a time. It is normal for parts of the day to feel ok, parts to feel painful, and parts to feel genuinely good. You do not have to resolve those feelings into a single coherent emotion. You do not have to perform gratitude you don't feel, or hide grief that is real, or pretend the day is simpler than it is.
Complicated is allowed.
What does grief on Mother’s Day actually look like?
For those who have experienced pregnancy loss, infertility, or the death of a baby, Mother's Day can be one of the hardest days of the year. Additionally, people who have lost their own mothers may find this day heavy and isolating. A wave of sadness that arrives in May does not erase the progress made in November.
The day may bring up grief that surprises you with its intensity, even if you thought you were doing okay. This is not a sign that something is wrong with you or that you are not healing. It is a sign that your love is real, and that love does not disappear just because the person or the possibility it was directed toward is no longer here.
The simplest way to honour yourself this year may be to just acknowledge that your grief and is valid and that Mothers Day is hard.
What if your relationship with your own mother is complicated?
Not everyone has a mother they can celebrate. Some people have mothers who were absent, abusive, neglectful, or simply not able to show up in the ways that were needed. Some people are estranged from their mothers, either by their own choice or by circumstance. Some people have mothers who are still present in their lives but with whom the relationship carries old wounds that have never fully healed.
For people in these situations, Mother's Day can feel profoundly alienating. The cultural narrative of motherhood is one of unconditional love and sacrifice and warmth, and when your lived experience doesn't match that narrative, it can be easy to feel that you are somehow the problem.
You are not the problem.
Complicated maternal relationships are more common than the Mother's Day card aisle would suggest. The pressure to perform celebration and gratitude for a relationship that has caused you pain is a real and unreasonable pressure. You are not obligated to participate in a cultural ritual that asks you to publicly honour something that has been a source of harm or loss in your life.
At the same time, it is also okay if you find yourself feeling something tender on this day, even toward a relationship that has hurt you. Grief for the mother you needed but didn't have. Longing for a closeness that never quite existed. A complicated love that doesn't fit neatly into either celebration or condemnation. These feelings are not a betrayal of yourself. They are part of what it means to be human in relationship with other imperfect humans.
Whatever you feel about your mother on this day, and whatever you choose to do with it, is yours. You do not owe anyone a tidy narrative.
What if you’re a new mother and Mother’s Day doesn’t feel how you expected?
There is a particular kind of loneliness in becoming a mother and finding that it is harder, stranger, more disorienting than you were led to believe. New motherhood is often portrayed as an immediate and overwhelming love, a natural unfolding of instinct and tenderness. For many people, it is also exhaustion, identity loss, physical recovery, relationship strain, and a grief for the self that existed before that nobody told you to expect.
If you are spending your first Mother's Day feeling less like the glowing image on a greeting card and more like someone who is barely holding it together, you are not alone and you are not failing.
The transition to motherhood is one of the most significant identity shifts a person can undergo. It reorganizes your sense of self, your relationships, your body, your time, your priorities. That reorganization is not always graceful or joyful. Sometimes it is disorienting and painful and full of ambivalence. Sometimes you love your baby fiercely and also mourn your former life. Sometimes you feel both of those things simultaneously.
This does not make you a bad mother. It makes you a human being navigating something genuinely hard.
Mother's Day in early motherhood can also bring its own specific pressures. The expectation that you should feel celebrated and grateful when you are mostly just tired. The comparison to other mothers who seem to be managing better. The guilt that arrives when the day doesn't feel the way you thought it would.
If any of this resonates, here is what we want you to hear: your experience of early motherhood is valid exactly as it is. The complicated feelings are not a sign that you are doing it wrong. They are a sign that you are doing something real.
Learn how we support postpartum here.
What if you have mixed feelings about your own mothering?
Most mothers carry, at some point, a quiet worry that they are not doing it well enough. That they have lost their temper too many times, been too distracted, missed something important, caused harm they didn't intend. Mother's Day, with its emphasis on honouring and celebrating mothers, can paradoxically become a day when those worries get louder.
Ambivalence about your own mothering is not evidence of failure. It is often evidence of care. The mothers who worry about whether they are doing enough are usually the ones who are trying hard and who love their children deeply. Certainty that you are doing everything perfectly is, if anything, a less reliable indicator of good mothering than the capacity to reflect honestly on where you could do better.
That said, there is a difference between healthy reflection and the kind of relentless self-criticism that leaves no room for acknowledging what you are doing well. If Mother's Day tends to be a day when the inner critic gets particularly loud, it is worth asking: what would it look like to receive the appreciation being offered to you today, even partially? What would it look like to let yourself be honoured, not because you have been a perfect mother, but because you have been a present and trying one?
You do not have to earn the right to be celebrated today by achieving some standard of flawless mothering. No one meets that standard. The love your children have for you is not contingent on your perfection. And neither is your worth as a mother.
How do you hold complicated feelings about Mother’s Day without being overwhelmed?
One of the most useful things we can offer ourselves on a day like Mother's Day is permission to hold complexity. To let the hard parts be hard without letting them erase the moments that feel okay or even good. To let the good moments exist without guilt that you are not feeling worse, or relief that you are not feeling better.
Emotions are not mutually exclusive. You can feel grief and gratitude in the same afternoon. You can feel resentment and love toward the same person. You can feel exhausted and also moved by a small moment of connection with your child. You can feel the weight of everything you have lost and also find something worth appreciating in the day.
This is not inconsistency. This is the full range of human emotional experience, and it is particularly present on days that carry this much cultural and personal weight.
If you find yourself struggling this Mother's Day, we hope you will be gentle with yourself. Reach out to someone who can hold the complexity with you, whether that is a friend, a partner, a therapist, or simply someone who knows that your experience of this day is not straightforward and who will not ask you to pretend otherwise.
You do not have to make this day into something it isn't. You are allowed to meet it exactly as it is, with all of its contradictions intact.
That is enough. You are enough.
Mother’s Day does not have to be resolved into a single coherent emotion. You do not have to perform gratitude you do not feel, or hide grief that is real, or pretend the day is simpler than it is.
Meet this day exactly as it is, with all of its contradictions intact.
If you would like to learn more about how therapy could be helpful for you, consider booking a 15 minute consult call with one of our therapists. Call or text us at 226-400-4330, or visit our website to fill out our contact form https://innerworkslondon.com/contact
Frequently Asked Questions About Complicated Feelings on Mother’s Day
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Mother’s Day carries cultural and personal weight that does not always line up with how your life is going in the present. Grief, past experiences, and unmet expectations all surface around this day, sometimes unexpectedly. Feeling sad on Mother’s Day does not mean something is wrong right now. It means this day holds meaning for you.
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Yes. For people who have experienced loss, have complicated relationships with their mothers, or are struggling in their own role as a parent, dread is a reasonable response. Many people feel this way and do not say so, because the cultural script around Mother’s Day leaves little room for it.
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Grief does not have to be managed or fixed on this day. Acknowledge that the day is hard. Lower your expectations of what you need to accomplish or feel. Reach out to someone who knows your story and will not ask you to put on a brave face. A therapist who specializes in perinatal grief is a good place to start if you are not sure who that person is.
Sunnybrook is a Pregnancy and Infant Loss Network. -
Numbness is a valid emotional response, especially for people who have experienced loss, estrangement, or emotional overwhelm. Feeling nothing is not indifference. It is often the mind’s way of protecting itself from something that feels like too much. You do not need to manufacture feeling.
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Therapy offers a space to work through the feelings that Mother’s Day stirs up, without pressure to resolve them into something tidy. Whether you are grieving, navigating a difficult relationship with your mother, or struggling in your own experience as a parent, working with a therapist creates space to name what is real and find a way forward that is honest.
Want to work with a therapist? Get in touch here.
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If the feelings that surface around Mother’s Day feel heavy, persistent, or difficult to carry on your own, that is a reasonable signal to seek support. You do not have to be in crisis to benefit from speaking with someone. Therapy is a space for processing what is real, including the complicated feelings that come with a day like this.
