Every year around this time, I wonder what I’m supposed to do with myself.
Mother’s Day is one of America’s prettiest holidays. It’s full of flowers and brunch and pastel dresses with skirts full of gratitude for the matriarchs who gave us life. But for me, as someone whose mother died when I was a child, the second Sunday in May and the weeks leading up to it all feel like an endless slog.
I feel boxed in to perform a certain kind of grief that’s tender and sweet, like the praise everyone else gives to their living mothers. Mother’s Day-appropriate grief looks like talking about how I miss my mom’s hugs and her cooking, the way she braided my hair before school, or maybe sharing an Instagram collage of sepia-toned photos captioned with the one-two punch of a white heart emoji plus angel wings.
There is very little room in that Mother’s Day aesthetic for grief that isn’t soft or pretty. Like mine.
I’ve seen many a watercolor Pinterest quote lamenting “grief is love with nowhere to go.” But for me, sometimes grief is anger with nowhere to go. So, where does my grief fit in this time of year, as the girl whose mother died slowly, who has no memories of her mother getting her ready for school, and as the daughter who inherited not recipes but warnings about how cruel the world can be?
