Mother’s Day gets packaged as a tidy little celebration. Flowers. Brunch. A card with handwriting that suddenly looks suspiciously more heartfelt than usual. Maybe a social media caption that reads like everyone has fully processed their childhood and now communicates exclusively through gratitude and peonies. But for a lot of people, Mother’s Day doesn’t feel simple at all. It can bring up love, grief, guilt, resentment, longing, relief, confusion, numbness, or some chaotic emotional group chat made up of all of the above. And that doesn’t make you ungrateful, dramatic, or secretly bad at feelings.
The truth is, relationships with mothers - and motherhood itself - are often a lot more layered than the holiday version allows. Research on motherhood and mental health continues to show just how complex maternal identity, emotional wellbeing, and social pressure can be. Sometimes Mother’s Day feels warm and easy. Sometimes it feels like Mother’s Day grief in a floral print. Sometimes it feels like both.
There are a lot of valid reasons this day can hit hard
Maybe you miss your mom. Maybe your relationship with her is/was loving, but complicated. Maybe she showed up for you in some ways and deeply missed you in others. Maybe she’s still here, but the relationship is strained, distant, or fragile enough that even sending a text feels emotionally expensive. You could be grieving a mother you lost, the mother you needed and did not have, or a relationship that technically still exists but only in family group chats you keep muted for your own blood pressure.
For some people, Mother’s Day also stirs up infertility, pregnancy loss, postpartum struggles, adoption complexities, caregiving stress, or the ache of trying to become a parent and having the road there feel anything but simple. If that’s part of your story, support for infertility, miscarriage, and postpartum mental health can matter here too.
And for people navigating Mother’s Day estrangement, this holiday can bring a very specific kind of grief. As Cleveland Clinic explains, estrangement can involve a kind of ambiguous loss - one where the person is still alive, but the relationship is painful, fractured, or no longer safe. There may be love. There may be relief. There may be guilt. There may be sadness for what never was, or what can no longer be.
Love and pain can exist in the same relationship
This is where people tend to get stuck. There's a strong cultural urge to make mother relationships easy to label. She was amazing. She was awful. You should call her. You should forgive her. You should be grateful. You should set firmer boundaries. You should make the day special. You should not let it bother you so much.
Very helpful, truly. Gold star work from the collective internet.
Real relationships don’t usually fit into neat categories. You may love your mother and still feel hurt by her. You may understand her trauma and still need distance. You may appreciate what she did give you while also grieving what she couldn’t. You may even feel relieved to have less contact and still feel sad when Mother’s Day rolls around. Those feelings aren’t mutually exclusive and are often what honesty looks like.
Estrangement is more common than people think
Family estrangement is still talked about like some rare and scandalous thing, when in reality it isn’t nearly as uncommon as people imagine. A lot of people carry shame about the complexity of their family relationships, especially around holidays.
If Mother’s Day estrangement is part of your experience, the day may not just feel sad. It may feel confusing. You may question your boundaries. You may feel pressure to reach out because it’s what people expect. You may feel grief for the mother you hoped for, while also knowing why distance was necessary. That tension and the loneliness that can come with it is real.
A lot of people assume everyone else is just annoyed about restaurant reservations while they’re over here trying to decide whether opening Instagram will ruin their day before noon. Not exactly a Hallmark moment.
You’re also far from the only one. Reporting on parent-child estrangement has highlighted that these ruptures are more common and more nuanced than most people assume, especially when there’s a long history of hurt, mismatch, or unresolved family pain. TIME’s coverage of the research is a helpful reminder that estrangement usually doesn’t appear out of nowhere just because someone felt dramatic on a Tuesday.
Motherhood itself can feel complicated, too
Not everyone reading this is approaching Mother’s Day as someone’s child. Some are approaching it as a mother who is exhausted, touched out, grieving, overwhelmed, resentful, deeply grateful, lonely, proud, or wondering why everyone keeps acting like this role is supposed to feel instinctive and glowing all the time. That’s also part of the Mother’s Day mental health conversation. Motherhood can hold love and pressure at the same time. It can feel deeply meaningful and deeply depleting. You can love your children and still feel grief for old versions of yourself. You can feel grateful and overstimulated. You can want appreciation and also want everyone to please, for the love of God, stop touching you for ten minutes. The American Psychological Association has also written about how becoming a mother can reshape identity in both meaningful and difficult ways. If Mother’s Day feels complicated because you’re a mother, that counts too.
You don’t need a dramatic backstory to struggle with the emotional weight of the day. Sometimes the complexity is simply this: you love your kids, and you’re tired. You’re trying. You’re carrying a lot. A holiday centered on motherhood can shine a very bright light on everything that feels meaningful and everything that feels unfinished.
You are allowed to respond to this day honestly
You don’t owe Mother’s Day a performance. Read that again.
You’re allowed to celebrate wholeheartedly, keep it low-key, or send a text instead of making a phone call. You’re allowed to mute social media for the day, or make plans that have nothing to do with motherhood at all. You’re allowed to grieve, to feel relieved, or to feel like everyone else got a script for this holiday and you didn’t.
What tends to make complicated feelings about Mother’s Day harder is not just the feeling itself but the extra layer of judgment we pile on top of it. The internal lecture, the guilt spiral. The insistence that you should be more grateful, more healed, less affected, less angry, more understanding about the whole thing. What often helps more is naming the truth with a little less judgment. This day’s tender for me. This day’s complicated for me. This day brings up things I’m still working through. This day isn’t simple, and I don’t need to pretend otherwise.
A gentler way to move through it
Sometimes self-care advice around holidays sounds like it was written by someone who’s never actually had family. If Mother’s Day feels hard, try asking yourself one simple question: What would make this day a little more bearable, honest, or supportive for me? That might mean reaching out to someone safe or setting a boundary proactively. Maybe it means visiting your mom’s grave. It could mean not attending that brunch, letting yourself cry, and then ordering takeout without turning it into a personal failure.
It might also mean celebrating someone who mothered you in ways biology didn’t - a grandmother, an aunt, a stepmom, a mentor, a friend. Someone who helped you feel held, guided, protected, or known.
The bottom line
Mother’s Day isn’t simple because people aren’t simple. Some people feel grateful. Some feel heartbroken. Some feel angry. Some feel relieved. Some feel all of it at once and would very much like the world to stop acting surprised by that.
If you’re carrying Mother’s Day grief, wrestling with Mother’s Day estrangement, or just trying to make sense of your own complicated feelings about Mother’s Day, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not doing Mother’s Day badly - you’re having a human response to a deeply loaded day, and that deserves more compassion than performance. If Mother’s Day is bringing up more than you know what to do with, browse our therapists to find support that can help now and beyond this season.