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Mother’s Day is a multi-faceted holiday often marked with handmade crafts, cut-out hearts made into cards and toast and tepid coffee served in bed. 

I feel blessed that my girls venture out into the forest every year to take a sister picture together – despite how they are feeling about one another at that time (and in most shots, you can tell). They print the image and add it to a photo album they gave me years ago as a way of sweetly documenting their growth.

I’m very lucky. Both my girls are healthy, and this year my own mom is in town to celebrate with us.

I can look forward to Mother’s Day with joy and anticipation, but that’s not the case for everyone. I’m keenly aware that Mother’s Day is fraught with challenging backstory for many. It can conjure a great deal of emotion of a convoluted relationship between mother and child. 

Sometimes our mothers aren’t able to raise us, and they give us a chance at life in another family. We have mothers who adopt, mothers who foster, and mothers who marry into the family. We have mothers who take in another family member’s baby and raise us as their own. 

Sometimes we lose our mothers. It may be in childbirth; or when we are little children, so young we’re not sure if our memories are real or fantasy; and sometimes as young adults, before we marry or have children of our own. Sometimes our mothers live to meet their grandchildren but not long enough to see them grow up. 

Some mothers are physically present but unable to parent due to addiction, depression or other illness. We live with them, but they don’t raise us – and so we look to grandparents or older siblings, or we raise ourselves. And then there are those of us who are mothers to children who are no longer with us. We lose our children before they can be born full-term, in childbirth, or as infants. We lose them as children or young adults. Some of us live to see an adult child’s life snuffed out too early. Despite the loss, we remain their mothers. 

Yes, Mother’s Day is rife with stories invisible to the naked eye. We all have a story, and most are complicated and woven with complexities we can’t easily explain. 

This week, my children, who are now 10 and eight, asked me what I want for Mother’s Day, and it gave me pause. There is nothing they can give me – no clay coil pot or tissue paper flower – that can symbolize the deep well that they’ve already dug in my heart. 

The depth of my love for them is profound and enduring. We are fortunate to have our experiences of joy and sorrow, frustration and elation, discontent and tenderness tempered within the norms of our beautiful life. Our path has been a relatively easy one in comparison to so many others. And it’s nothing I take for granted. 

This Sunday, another page of my photo album will be filled with a Mother’s Day picture of my two girls (even if one of them pinched the other a whisper before the shutter clicked), one year older than the last. And as long as I’m still here with them, and they’re still here with me, there’s little more I could want.