If Mothers Day this year will be spent with your healthy child in one arm and your beloved mother and bunches of daffodils in the other then, my God, that is something to be celebrated. I hope it will be a day that amplifies the wholeness and contentment of your world.
I know, that this year, like all other years, the straight-forward messages of love I will send to friends or family on Mothers Day will be hugely outweighed by the messages I will send to recognise how tough this day is for many: the friend who’s had another heartbreaking baby loss, the friend who’s mother is terminally ill, the friend whose mother is dead, the friend hasn’t seen her mother for years, the friend navigating a vortex of terrifying post natal depression, the friend who has been tasked with life’s ultimate act of bravery, which is to live beyond the obliterative loss of the death of a child.
For so many, Mother’s Day probes at painful or complex realities that are not limited to this day at all. Rather, they are integral to some of the greatest challenges of their day-to-day lives. Mothers Day has a way of putting that heart-wrenching reality under the spotlight, demanding you to look at it, whether you want to or not.
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The platitudes around Mothers Day being a day of celebration are appropriate for lots of people, but they have suffocated and squashed the multitudes of other experiences on this day for generations. The latter deserve to be named and heard so that we can create a greater sense of commonality and buoyancy for each other on a day that otherwise, for so many, can feel like it silently takes them under.
I too, am one of those people.
My experience of becoming a mother was directly overlaid with the experience of losing my mother, the beloved former Labour MP Tessa Jowell. Ten weeks after I had my first child in 2017, Mum was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She died 11 months later, when my daughter was one.
I was mentally prepared for the first Christmas and the first birthday without her, but I hadn’t anticipated at all how potent the first Mothers Day without her would feel. It completely blindsided me. The disorientating duality was that, by this point, I had a glorious two-year-old and was six months pregnant with my second child, for which I also felt cellular gratitude and love. But my grief at that point was new and raw - sometimes it had the power to engulf everything else in its wake. I knew other people my age whose mums had died and who seemed to show such grace and poise on Mother's Day. But it made me feel so many ugly and awful things; jealousy, anger, but mostly, for the week before Mothers Day weekend and then on the day itself, I was on fire with sadness.
I knew that the death of a person of her age, who had lived the extraordinary life she lived, could not be considered a tragedy. I knew it's the wish of every parent that they would die before their child. I knew it was 'right' that she died before me. I also knew that I was so lucky to have lived inside her love until I was an adult and a mother myself. But the spotlight of Mother’s Day shone such brilliant clarity on her being dead and gone from my life, my children's lives, my family's lives. For that whole weekend I felt like there had been a death of everything I knew because there is no place in my life that my love for my mum, and hers for me, didn’t touch. It's what I'm made from.
After mothers day lunch with my mother-in-law, husband and daughter that year, I remember pushing my two-year-old round the block in her buggy to try and get her to sleep. As I turned the corner of my street, something happened that I’d never experienced before. I was hit by a tsunami of missing my mum that was so powerful it literally took me to my knees. I remember crouching down, with searing blue skies and raspberry ripple explosions of springs new cherry blossoms overhead, one hand reached up still rocking the buggy, the other hand at my mouth, so my toddler couldn't hear the involuntarily small moan that escaped my mouth, like an animal in pain. Throughout the rest of the day, when my daughter reached her arms up to me over my huge pregnant stomach, I felt I had to pat myself together like a mound of sand. I was there, both crumbling and held together all at once.
This year will be my sixth Mother's Day without her and I have lived with her death long enough now to know how the furnace of loss, in time, does mercifully cool. I also know that, no matter how many years pass, to prepare myself for how Mother's Day will (possibly always) create a reflective point where even with the incredible blessing of having my two healthy children clambering over me in bed in the morning, I'll no choice but to feel the silence, where the gloriousness and intricacy of our love had always been. Sometimes we have no choice but to hold unbearable amounts of pain and sadness at a soul level. But if we can just keep going to see in another day, another month, another year, another Mother's Day you will see, as I have, that the gentle times can and do come. I promise you, they do.
So if this Mother's Day is a day when you can't celebrate with your own mother, or with children, please hang in there and know that today you are in the company of so many, myself included. Maybe instead, let it be a day to reflect on your resilience, your courage- and how proud you should be of yourself for holding it all. Personally, on Sunday morning I'm going to go out and buy myself some daffodils, which were my mum’s favourites. She would love to have thought of me doing that… I would love to think of you, wherever you are, doing that too.
Jess Mills is currently writing her book 'We Are Each Other', detailing her experience of becoming a mother whilst losing her own mother to terminal brain cancer in 2018.
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