Mother’s Day is loud.
Not in a bad way necessarily. Just loud. Everywhere you look someone is being celebrated or called or taken to brunch. The world turns a particular shade of pink for about a week and then moves on.
For some people that week is uncomplicated.
For others it sits a little sideways.
I wanted to be a mother. For a long time I really did. Twins even they run on both sides of my family and I used to think about that. What that would look like. What I would be like.
But after ten years of marriage and not conceiving and then medical intervention and pregnancies that didn’t hold something inside me shifted.
Quietly. Not all at once.
I started to realize that some part of me wanted a child more for my husband than for myself. And underneath that realization were things I wasn’t ready to look at yet. Old things. Things I had been carrying for a long time that made me afraid not of motherhood exactly, but of what I might not be able to protect a child from.
I told my husband.
I told him everything. The shift in what I wanted. The fear underneath it. Things I had never said out loud to anyone.
I expected him to be hurt. Or angry. Or quietly devastated in the way people are when a life they imagined starts to change shape.
He wasn’t any of those things.
He said if we were meant to be parents it would happen. And if not we had each other. And that was enough for him.
He said nothing I could ever tell him would make him love me less or want to protect me less.
I think about that moment a lot.
The particular relief of being known completely by someone and loved anyway. Of putting down something heavy you’ve been carrying alone and having someone say — I’ve got you. Put it down.
That’s not nothing. That’s everything actually.
So no. I’m not a mother. Not in the traditional sense.
But every Mother’s Day I celebrate my mother. And the mothers in my life who have shown me what that love looks like up close.
And I celebrate myself.
As the mother of two cats named Sebastian and Cleopatra littermates, both of them, from the same litter.
I wanted twins my whole life. Turns out I got them.
Just not exactly the way I imagined.
They don’t care what I look like or what I’ve been through or what I didn’t become.
They just want to be near me.
Honestly? Same.
Happy Mother’s Day to every kind of mother. And to everyone for whom this day is complicated you’re allowed to feel all of it.