My First Mother’s Day as a Mom Without My Mom

This Mother’s Day feels different than I expected.

Last year, I wrote about how I could hold both the emotions of deep sadness of missing my mom and the growing joy of becoming one. It felt balanced.

But this year, now that I’m actually living it, the balance feels different.

I am SO happy to be a mom. It is, without question, the best thing that has ever happened to me. There are moments I look at my daughter, Charlee, and feel a kind of love that almost knocks the air out of me. A love that makes everything else fade for a second.

And right beside that love, sometimes underneath it, sometimes louder than it, is grief.

Not just because I miss my mom. But because I am a mom… without my mom.

It’s the moments I don’t expect that get me. The instinct to reach for my phone to tell her something small. The questions I wish I could ask. The quiet pride I wish she could see. All the spoiling I know she would have done. Seeing my friends and their moms, and grandmothers and granddaughters spending time together. The hard days where I just want to be taken care of, even for a minute.

I understand Mom differently now. I see how much she must have carried. How much she must have loved me. How many invisible things she did that I’m only just beginning to notice.

And with that understanding comes a new kind of missing and longing… a deeper one.

Because now I don’t just miss my mom as her daughter… I miss her as a fellow mom. As someone who would have gotten it in a way no one else quite can.

I thought this Mother’s Day might make the joy feel bigger than the grief, but it feels a bit of the opposite. Grief feels a little bigger, and I will accept that that’s how it is this year. Maybe next year or the year after the balance might shift. Or maybe it won’t, and I think that’s okay too. Today I will hold my baby in one arm and reach for my mom with the other. I won’t choose between joy and grief, and I won’t expect them to be balanced.

Happy Mother's Day out there to all mothers. To anyone grieving the loss of your mom this Mother’s Day, I see you and feel you.