Mother’s Day doesn’t end when the brunch does.
Not for people like us.
If you’re an empath or an HSP you already know what I’m talking about. The holiday doesn’t arrive and leave cleanly. It moves through the people around you and you feel all of it whether you chose to or not. The grief. The longing. The complicated love that doesn’t have a card in the shop for it.
I see it in my work every year without fail.
It always shows up in one of two ways.
The first is the child who was everything to their mother and the mother who was everything to them.
So intertwined that the edges between them were never really clear. Every decision made together. Every milestone shared. A love so consuming it left room for very little else.
And then the mother dies.
And the child grown, capable, someone who has lived a whole life doesn’t know how to stay.
Not because they’re weak. Because their reason for being here felt like it left with her. Because nobody told them that love like that, as beautiful as it is, can also swallow you whole if you’re not careful.
I sit with these people and I feel the depth of what they’re carrying and I know that nothing I say is going to fill that particular silence.
But I say it anyway. Because they need to hear it even if they’re not ready yet.
The second is the child who spent a lifetime reaching.
Trying to earn something. Trying to finally do the thing or say the thing or be the thing that would make their mother turn and see them fully. Really see them.
And it never came.
Not because they weren’t enough. Because their mother didn’t have it to give. Whatever was needed to offer that kind of acceptance it wasn’t there. Maybe it was never given to her either.
They come to me looking for answers. Wanting to understand why. Wanting someone to finally explain the hole that has been sitting in their chest for as long as they can remember.
And I can give them context. I can give them understanding. I can tell them things that help it make a little more sense.
But I can’t fill the hole.
Nobody can fill it from the outside. That’s the part that’s hard to say and harder to hear.
Here’s what I want to say to both of them. To all of you carrying either version of this.
You are enough.
Not when you’ve grieved the right way or forgiven the right amount or finally stopped needing what you needed. Right now. As you are.
The only opinion that will ever truly matter is your own.
Not your mother’s. Not anyone else’s.
Yours.
I know that’s not the answer you came looking for. I know it doesn’t fix anything.
But it’s the truest thing I know how to say.
And sometimes the truest thing is the only thing worth saying.