05/11/2026
Mother’s Day is one of those days where whatever I say is going to land differently for everyone reading. There is no version of this caption that doesn’t ask something hard of someone. So I’m just going to start by naming it.
Today is complicated.
If you are someone’s mother and today feels like the one day a year you might actually get to sit down — I see you. I hope someone hands you the good coffee.
If you are not a mother, by choice or by circumstance or by a grief you don’t talk about much — I see you too. The cultural script today is loud, and it does not leave a lot of room for the women who are mothering in ways that don’t show up on a card.
If your mother is gone — recently or for so long it’s become its own kind of weather — today asks you to perform a relationship with absence. That’s a heavy ask, and I don’t think we acknowledge it nearly enough.
If your mother is alive and the relationship is hard, or distant, or unresolved — today is also for you. The women who are mothering themselves through what they didn’t get are doing some of the most quietly heroic work I know.
Here is what I keep coming back to. Mothering — the verb, not the title — is not actually about who calls you Mom. It is about whether you show up for what is in front of you. Whether you tend things. Whether the people and creatures and projects in your orbit feel safer because you are there.
By that definition, almost every woman I know is mothering something. And almost none of us do it perfectly. We do it tired. We do it on Tuesdays. We do it while grieving. We do it without enough rest, without enough help, without enough acknowledgment that what we’re carrying is, in fact, heavy.
So today, the only thing I want to say is this: whoever you are mothering today — including, especially, yourself — that counts. Not because it produced anything. Not because anyone noticed. Because you showed up.
You do not have to earn today. You just have to be in it.
Tell me in the comments: what shape does your mothering take? Or just leave a heart, if today is a quiet one. I’m reading all of them.
xo
