I still talk to my mother. We have lunch sometimes. She doesn't understand my boundaries and I've stopped expecting her to. I'm not estranged — not fully. But I know the complicated terrain of loving a mother who couldn't see you, who needed you to be the parent when you were the child, who called you her partner when you were eleven. Mother's Day arrives every year with its pink cards and brunch reservations and demands that you celebrate the woman who raised you. And if that woman didn't raise you so much as use you, the day becomes a minefield.
You're allowed to have complicated feelings on Mother's Day. You're allowed to love your mother and also need distance from her. You're allowed to be grateful for what she did give you and angry about what she didn't. You're allowed to not celebrate at all. You're allowed to send a card and nothing more. You're allowed to spend the day taking care of yourself — the child she didn't take care of — instead of taking care of her. In my house, being a good daughter meant making yourself useful. It meant managing the younger ones, managing the household, managing emotions that were never supposed to be mine to carry. Mother's Day, in that framework, was another performance: make her feel appreciated, make her feel like a good mother, make sure the day is about her. At forty-one, I've stopped performing. Some years I call her. Some years I don't. Both are fine. Neither makes me a bad daughter. The 'bad daughter' label was always her way of saying I wasn't meeting her needs. I wasn't supposed to be meeting her needs. I was a child.
How to Survive the Day
If Mother's Day is hard for you: stay off social media if the happy posts feel like salt in a wound. Plan something for yourself — something soft, something that feels like care. Write the letter you'll never send, if that helps. Call her, if you want to. Don't call her, if you don't. Protect your peace. You don't owe anyone a performance of gratitude for a childhood that cost you more than anyone acknowledged. And if the grief shows up — grief for the mother you should have had, the childhood you should have been given — let it be there. It's real. It belongs to you. It doesn't make you ungrateful. It makes you honest.
— Delia
About the Author
Delia is the eldest of four in a Nigerian-American family. She was parentified before she knew the word and spent decades unlearning the lesson that love means sacrificing your own needs. She still talks to her mother — with boundaries that took years to build and are still under construction.
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