When Mother’s Day is Hard: Influenced by Estrangement, Grief and Unmet Needs

Mother's Day is not a wonderful day and cause for celebration for everyone. For some Mother's Day is fraught, complicated, even sad, including estrangement and grief.

Maybe your relationship with your mother triggers old wounds due to unmet needs. Maybe you are grieving either an estranged mother or one that has passed.

These all have challenges and require different coping skills to get through.

Mother’s Day: Getting Mothering that was Not Optimal and Needs Go Unmet causing Estrangement and Grief

The most common struggle I see at this time of the year, on Mother's Day, is the grief we experience when our childhood mothering was not optimal.

Was your mother depressed?

Has she been a toxic/abusive force in your life, making it hard to be close to other people, even now?

Was she physically or mentally ill and had little capacity to be the mother she wanted to be?  

No matter the reason, it means you had needs as a child that were not met. This always has an impact on us.

Sometimes we learn to dissociate from our needs and truly believe we don’t have any.

Sometimes we feel the opposite is true, we have so many needs and want a partner to meet them all, but it is likely impossible for them to do so. All of this can lead to being very angry or resentful in our relationship with our mothers as well.

Mother’s Day can open these wounds for us, especially if we feel we are/should celebrate and take care of a woman we feel did not meet those needs for us.

Mother’s Day: Grieving the Estranged Mother

Have you made the hard decision to distance and not see your mother? Is your relationship estranged?

Has this relationship been so toxic to your mental health you have had no choice but to distance to meet self-care needs?

This means Mother’s Day involves not seeing your mother, but likely you are very aware of why you are not seeing her.  This also triggers a form of grief, grieving a mother that is still with us. Mother’s Day can bring up sadness, anger and be just horribly heavy in our body.

After all, the mother-child relationship is so complicated. It is vulnerable and likely involves our mother’s own family trauma being brought to the surface, intergenerational trauma.

What feels right for you today? Distracting yourself, ignoring the day? Attending a mental health support group? Talking to friends about the complexity of this day? Seeing your therapist? Maybe spend time with a mother-in-law or mentor, a woman that has filled a mothering role in your life?

Mother’s Day: Grieving A Mother that has Passed

Maybe your mother had passed on. Grief is embodied and physically heavy, never ending and coming in spurts, seemingly out of nowhere sometimes. It can make Mother’s Day a day to dread. Even more difficult if you had an abusive or toxic relationship with your mother, right?

The best way is to sit with these feelings and just take space to let the grief flow through you, allowing healthy processing.

Building ritual can be very powerful as well. You can go to the gravesite and leave flowers there, get family together for a big, shared meal. Burning something and releasing it to the wind, letting the river take a piece of paper with a written thought on it, can all be healing.

Think about what you need today. Build a plan you can incorporate and shape for years to come.

Mother’s Day: Self-Mothering Unmet Needs

I find healing our mothering experience includes 3 pieces:

1) Identifying the complete nature/consequences of the developmental/relational trauma, including related unmet needs.

2) Trying to shape a different relationship with your mother &/or accepting the relationship will likely not change and determining how to function within it.

3) Learning to have your newly identified unmet needs met in a different way.

Some of us are lucky enough to have a partner that meets many of the needs of our inner child, but this can be hard to find. I also find that unmet childhood needs go deep and no one person can meet them.  So we need to learn to mother ourselves to honour these needs as valid.

Nurture yourself through self-compassion, validating feelings and needs. Bring comfort to your life. Practice self-care. Create safety in your life through places and in relationships, enforcing healthy boundaries. Creating a nurturing routine to either begin or end your day can be powerful. Practicing mindfulness helps us rewire our brain to expect different results.

Lisa S.

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