The Unmothered and the Unmothering: A Mother’s Day for the Rest of Us

For the ones who waited, wandered, and now live with the quiet aftermath.

May 09, 2025

The Day That Doesn’t Quite Belong to Me

Every year, Mother’s Day comes around like a freight train dressed in flowers.

It’s a day thick with sentiment, celebration—and for some of us, silence.
This year, I almost didn’t write. Not because I didn’t have something to say, but because what I feel doesn’t quite fit the occasion.

I never became a mother.
I never decided I wouldn’t—I just waited.
Life kept happening, and somehow I never got to ask myself the real question until it was too late to answer it.
Now, I live with that absence. Some days it’s quiet. Other days, it’s a storm.

I feel anger—at myself, for drifting. At my mother, for reasons I’m still unravelling. At a world that told me I had time, then judged me when I ran out.
And sometimes I feel nothing at all. Just a vague blankness where others feel nostalgia or love.

This post isn’t a celebration.
It’s an honouring—of the complicated space many of us live in: the unmothered, the unmothering, the ones who nurtured in other ways, or not at all.

What Was Missed (and What Wasn’t)

I didn’t just miss the chance to raise a child.
I missed the version of myself that might have bloomed alongside them.

The one who got woken up at 3 a.m. and learned how strong she really was.
The one who might’ve softened in ways I’ll never understand.
The one who perhaps would’ve been more tired, but also more rooted.

But I also didn’t contort myself into a life that didn’t fit.
I didn’t chase a child through the wrong relationship.
I didn’t sacrifice everything just to prove I could.

Still—there is a grief here.
A grief not from something that happened, but from something that never did.
No name for it. No ritual. No sympathy card.
Just the quiet erosion of a future that never arrived.

The Mother I Had—and the Silence Between Us

My mother died six years ago.
We weren’t close. Not emotionally. Not in the ways that mattered most to me.
I wished we were. We spoke, but we rarely saw each other.

She thought she did her duty as a mother. But she didn’t show me how to be a woman, or how to ask hard questions.
She lived inside her own unspoken pain—pain she never explained, but passed down anyway.

That’s the thing about emotional inheritance: it doesn’t come wrapped in words.
It’s passed through tone, through tension, through what’s not said.
And what she passed down was silence.
She learned not to ask for too much, so I never learned how to ask at all.

This is the mother wound—not just in the absence of closeness, but in the absence of modelling.
She didn’t ask if I wanted children.
She didn’t help me figure out who I was beneath the roles and expectations.
She handed me her silence, and I carried it like it was mine.

Maybe her mother handed it to her too.

This is how generational patterns continue—not because we want them to, but because they’ve never been questioned out loud.

What I’ve Nurtured (Even Without Children)

For a long time, I thought not having children meant I hadn’t nurtured anyone.
That I was somehow less generous. Less whole.

But care has many forms.

I’ve held friends through heartbreak.
I’ve built spaces where people could breathe.
I’ve loved, in quieter ways, people who never even knew they were being held.

And I’ve also withheld.
Resented the idea that women must always give.
Guarded my time, my body, my softness.

I’ve nurtured not just people, but ideas. Places. Moments.
I’ve mothered through presence, through attention.
I’ve learned to hold space, even when no one noticed.

And I’m still learning how to hold myself.

The Anger I Carry

There’s anger in me.
Sometimes raw. Sometimes hidden under a calm exterior that people mistake for peace.

I’m angry at myself—for the waiting, for the passivity, for assuming the future would offer clarity.
Angry at how long I stayed quiet.
Angry that no one—especially my mother—helped me ask the right questions before it was too late.

And I’m angry at the myths.
That motherhood is natural. That wanting it should be obvious.
That if it didn’t happen, you must not have really wanted it.

I wanted the option.
I wanted the chance to decide.
Now I don’t get to choose—and that, more than anything, is what haunts me.

And then, there are days when I feel nothing at all.
Just a strange stillness. An emptiness that doesn’t ache, but also doesn’t leave.

A Different Way to Hold Mother’s Day

I don’t have a ritual for this day.
No flowers, no phone call, no homemade card waiting for me.
Just the echo of what isn’t.

But I’m learning to let this day be what it is—not a celebration, but a remembering.

There are many ways to mother, and many ways to be mothered.
Some of us carry lineage.
Some of us carry loss.
Some of us carry the silence passed down to us—and are just now finding the words to break it.

If this day feels sharp to you, or dull, or nothing at all—take it anyway.
Light a candle. I will, for my mother.
Write a letter to the version of yourself that waited too long.
Place your hand on your heart and whisper, “I see you.”

Because you deserve to be seen.
Even in your quiet, even in your doubt.
Even when you carry the mother wound and are still learning how to heal it.

This Mother’s Day, I choose not to look away.
Not from the ache.
Not from the anger.
Not from the love that still lives in me, even if it never had a child to land on.

Today, I mother myself. She needs me.

🌀 If this spoke to something in you…

Share it with someone who might need it.

Or leave a comment—I’d love to hear how you’re holding Mother’s Day this year, whatever it means to you.

The Calm & Confident Mind

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