When Mother’s Day Hurts: Navigating Grief When Your Relationship with Your Mom Is Estranged or Complicated

Mother’s Day is complicated for many people, and for a million different reasons. Today’s blog post addresses a unique facet of Mother’s Day grief — grieving a mother who may still be living, but one with whom you have a difficult or estranged relationship.

We most often think of grief in terms of someone dying. However, the grief we feel when a relationship with a living person is painful or estranged is very real. This is sometimes referred to as an ambiguous loss. The person is still alive, but for whatever reason, they are either not a part of our lives or are a painful part of our lives. This can be hard because ambiguous losses typically don’t receive the same amount of support from other people as when someone dies. The Grief Recovery Institute illustrates this as the feeling of reaching out for someone who has always been there for you, only to find that when we need them one more time, they are no longer there. Or, the feeling of reaching out for someone who has never been there for you, and still isn’t.

Much of what we discuss here will apply to any estranged relationship, but since we are focusing on mothers, I will use the mother-child relationship as my example throughout.

Mother’s Day As A Trigger

For much of the year, we might be able to make peace with or at least set aside our complex relationship with our mother. But Mother’s Day can be a trigger that brings it all to the surface. We are bombarded with Mother’s Day messaging from advertisers and society in general. Even though I’ve seen in recent years certain companies allowing subscribers to opt out of Mother’s Day messaging, it’s nearly impossible to avoid altogether.

Mother’s Day focuses on the idealized version of a mother and mother-child relationships, and if your reality doesn’t look like that at all, it can be a painful reminder of what you’ve lost. Social media posts about people’s wonderful relationships with their mothers can also feel alienating. And, if you aren’t completely estranged from your mother but it’s still difficult, her expectations (or even society’s expectations!) on how you celebrate the day can be frustrating or upsetting.

Because Mother’s Day comes around every year, you may face the annual decision of how to manage it. Do you send a card or flowers? Do you reach out for a phone call? Or do you maintain boundaries? There is a weight and an exhaustion of having to make these decisions that may be simple for other people but are quite complicated for you. That weight is often not understood or acknowledged by others.

Grieving What Is or What Never Was

Perhaps you’ve never had a good relationship with your mother. Or maybe you did at one time, but now that is no longer true. Give yourself permission to grieve this loss — even if your mother is still alive. The loss of the maternal relationship you once had, never had, or that you’ve seen in others and wish you had for yourself is real, and it’s okay to have a range of complicated feelings about that. Coming to terms with the relationship you have (or don’t have) versus the relationship you wish you had can be a painful process. I have worked with clients specifically on relationships with an estranged mother, and there is always a deep array of emotions involved.

Redefining Honor

Mother’s Day is a day to honor our mothers or mother figures, traditionally done through gatherings, cards, flowers, and gifts. In recent years, social media posts have also been a very common way for people to honor their relationship with their mothers. However, when your relationship with your mom has been marked by pain, trauma, and disappointment, it can feel inauthentic or even harmful to mark Mother’s Day with the usual celebrations and tokens. “Honoring” your mother doesn’t feel possible. So, we will look at ways to create space for the full truth of your experience with your mother and find ways that this relationship has shaped you.

Honoring through Truth

Most relationships have both positive and negative elements, even if they really skew one way or another. Your lived experience matters, and being truthful about this is a way to bring honor to your relationship. This can involve acknowledging both good times and bad times with your mother and the wounds and gifts from your relationship. Maybe you had a painful relationship with your mother, but she taught you by example what not to do so that you can be an amazing mother to your own children—a hurtful thing to realize, but one that benefits your children today.

Acknowledging wounds and gifts also creates space for the idea that complex, conflicting emotions can co-exist, and that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be one way or the other. There’s room to feel multiple feelings at once. They don’t have to cancel each other out. Honoring doesn’t mean dismissing painful realities and ignoring deep wounds.

Honoring through Understanding

Though it doesn’t take away the pain of neglect, mistreatment, or abuse, contextualizing your mother’s lived experience can provide understanding and can sometimes help us remove ourselves from their actions. I’m in no way trying to imply that we should try to excuse their harmful actions, but giving humanity to them brings a complex understanding of why they behave in a way that has caused and continues to cause so much pain. We can have compassion on our mothers for the things they experienced, AND still be hurt by them.

This can look like exploring your mom’s own upbringing and limitations. Does she have a physical or mental illness, or does she struggle with addiction? How do these affect her capacity to mother? Was her life filled with abuse? Is there generational trauma or patterns at play that she was not equipped to overcome? Again, these factors do not excuse someone’s behavior toward you, but they can provide a framework for understanding the person behind the pain.

Honoring through Boundaries

Setting boundaries can be difficult, and this is often especially hard with mothers because of the expectations involved in the parent-child relationship. But establishing boundaries that protect your peace in a complicated relationship is very important, even if it sounds counterintuitive in terms of “honoring”. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here because each relationship is unique. For example, you may decide you want to send a card, but you don’t want to spend time in person with your mom on Mother’s Day. Just because it’s Mother’s Day, doesn’t mean your boundaries don’t matter in how you choose to acknowledge (or not) the holiday.

Boundaries can be an act of self-respect that honors what you’ve experienced in the past and what you need to continue to heal. Boundaries are for you, not the other person. Boundaries can also be a way of maintaining connection that doesn’t continue to perpetuate harm, such as in the example above about sending a card versus spending time together.

Honoring through Personal Growth

Sometimes the most meaningful way to honor a complicated mother-child relationship is to choose to heal from the harm that relationship caused you. This can help you break harmful patterns going forward in your other relationships, particularly those we pass down to our own children. You can also work on developing traits you wish your mother had. For example, if your mom often yelled, you can work on your communication skills so you don’t feel like you have to raise your voice even when you are upset. Doing inner child work with a therapist can also be helpful in finding ways to “mother” yourself to fulfill some of the needs your own mother did not meet. As I previously mentioned, I have helped clients work on difficult or estranged relationships with family members, which is very healing. If you’d like to find out more about working together on a relationship like this, please set up a free consultation call HERE.

Honor through Release

For some people the best way to honor a painful mother-child relationship is to let go of it. We don’t forget, but we release ourselves from the obligation to maintain a relationship with unhealthy dynamics or to carry on a harmful relationship. This can involve accepting (even if you don’t like it) the relationship you have and letting go of the hope that she will become the mother you needed or the mother you currently need.

It takes some self-compassion, but releasing yourself from the guilt of not fulfilling traditional Mother’s Day expectations can also be freeing. Sometimes the best way you can honor yourself and your healing is through distance. In a way, it honors your mother, too, because the distance protects you from more harm from her.

This redefined sense of honor and honoring your mother on Mother’s Day probably doesn’t look like how society would define honoring a parent. But when you’ve had a painful relationship, this redefinition creates space for more authenticity in how you approach Mother’s Day by allowing you to acknowledge the impact that the relationship with your mom has had on your life without forcing yourself into painful or inauthentic celebrations of a holiday that hurts.