For every mother who has ever been more than a greeting card could hold.
Mother’s Day arrives the same way every year. Flowers appear in store windows. Brunch reservations fill up weeks in advance. Social media becomes a gallery of smiling women surrounded by people who love them.
It is a beautiful day and one that I cherish for all the love that I get to witness. It is also, for a significant number of people, one of the more complicated Sundays on the calendar.
This is not a post that will ask you to set the complexity aside. It is one that tries to hold all of it at once; the gratitude and the grief, the celebration and the exhaustion, the mothers who are here and the ones who are not, the ones who are loudly celebrated and the ones who have been giving quietly for years without anyone thinking to look.
Some of the women this day belongs to will not see themselves in the standard narrative. This is for them too.
There is a particular kind of mothering that is never glamorous and rarely acknowledged: the kind made entirely of early mornings, of saying yes to things you cannot afford and figuring it out anyway, of protecting your children from the weight of what you are carrying so they can simply be children. My mother, Audrey, did that for me and my sisters. Multiple jobs, long hours and experiences that even a book could not do justice to in this lifetime. Careful, deliberate management of what we had so that we were fed, educated and held together. She made it look like stability from the inside. I only understood later what it cost from the outside. Many mothers do this and carry it without complaint and without recognition. They deserve more than one Sunday a year.
My sister Suene is a mother whose quiet determination keeps me in genuine awe. She has given her daughter something that takes real intention to build:
The things we could not dare dream as children are ordinary parts of her daughter’s life now.
That is not an accident. That is a mother making deliberate, sacrificial choices every single day about what kind of world her child will inherit. The maturity it takes to build something beyond the breadth of your own experience, to measure your success not by what you have accumulated but by what you have made possible for someone else; I watch it and I am not unmoved.
I have been in Canada long enough to recognize something in the mothers I have met here who came from somewhere else. There is a particular loss that does not make it into the Mother’s Day narrative: the loss of context, of community, of the village that was supposed to help raise the child. The grandmother left behind. The aunties across a phone screen. The language your child is growing up without because survival required a different one. Immigrant mothers carry their children’s futures in one hand and their own buried histories in the other. They trade the familiar for the possible. They arrive somewhere new and build from nothing, often without recognition, often without the support structures that were supposed to come with the life they left. What they create from that position is extraordinary. What it costs them is something most people never think to ask about but it is something they carry with strength because it is from a Mother’s heart.
There is also the mother of a child with special needs: medical, developmental, behavioral, any combination thereof, who is doing a job that does not have hours, does not have weekends, and does not accommodate the kind of rest most people consider basic. She is coordinating appointments, advocating in rooms that do not always welcome her, managing the emotional weight of her child’s experience alongside her own, and doing it consistently, without the option to step back. She is exhausted in a way that a single day of recognition cannot touch. She does not need to be told she is strong. She already knows. What she needs is genuine, sustained support that this one Sunday cannot provide but can at least prompt us to think seriously about. If you know one of these mothers, this week is a good week to ask what she actually needs. Not what you can celebrate. What she needs.
And then there are the women this day tends to forget entirely:
There are women who extended warmth, guidance and genuine love to me here in Canada when I was far from home. Women who made space for me without being asked, who checked on me, who offered something I did not always know I needed until it arrived. Women who believed in my dreams and pursuits just as they would carry dear the dreams of their own children. To name a few: Auntie Sharon, Grace, Margaret, Winnie and others that would fill a journal page if I named them all. There are women like them in more lives than they will ever know and they make a difference with the love they so freely share.
Mother’s Day is also a difficult day for daughters whose mothers are no longer here. For mothers estranged from their children. For women whose relationship with their own mother is complicated enough that the day arrives with more weight than warmth. These experiences are real and they sit alongside every celebration happening simultaneously. They do not need to be fixed or explained. They need to be acknowledged, which is its own form of care. If this day is hard for you, that is a legitimate response to a day that was not designed with your experience in mind. You are allowed to feel what you feel without performing something different for the benefit of the occasion.
We speak on WhatsApp, my mother and I. We navigate the time difference, our growth, our stories and the miles between us with the tools available to us, which are better than they used to be and still not the same as being in the same room. She made sacrifices so that I could build a life here which includes the weight all mothers carry; the torn desire between wanting to your child to be safe and close in your protection while simultaneously challenging them to fly high. I carry that with me not as guilt but as gratitude; the kind that quietly shapes how you move through the world and what you choose to do with the opportunities someone else worked to make possible.
I am also grateful for the mothers who love the people I love with everything they have. That love, even when it does not always know how to reach across every distance, is something I respect deeply.
Happy Mother’s Day Mommy. This one is for you and for every woman who has ever loved someone else more than she was required to.
To every mother reading this: the exhausted one, the celebrated one, the grieving one, the quietly extraordinary one, the one whose arms are empty in a way that does not heal, the one who mothers without the title – you are seen. Not just today. Happy Mother’s Day!
For more honest conversations about real life, listen to Chat Time with Ro on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow along on Instagram at @rochellejchong.
