No Crying on Mother’s Day: How to Have a Mother’s Day That Isn’t Miserable

By Shawna Gamache (Estimated reading time: 4 minutes)

For at least the first six years of my parenting journey, the second Sunday in May found me sobbing under my covers.  

I don’t cry on Mother’s Day anymore, but it took me a long time to get to this point. I’ve learned a lot over my first 15 years marking my motherhood — about myself and what I actually need from this possibly well-intentioned holiday.  

You can have a better Mother’s Day by giving yourself some thought before that Sunday in May rolls around. Here’s to a perfectly fine and hopefully dry-eyed Mother’s Day for all of the moms — and to more of what we need throughout the year.  

Find out what you want 

I was definitely trying to cram too much into my earliest Mother’s Days as a mom. Like a lot of us, I was lucky enough to start my motherhood journey with my mother and grandmothers and mother-in-law alive, and deserving recognition.  

When Mother’s Day rolled around, I squeezed in brunch with my grandma, gardening with my other grandma, sending a flower arrangement to my mother-in-law, booking my own mama a massage and spending quality time with my kids who of course still behaved in developmentally appropriate ways both maddening and endearing — before collapsing in my bed defeated. Another Mother’s Day had gone by without any real respite for me.  

I finally realized that what I really needed on Mother’s Day was to do something completely low-stakes all by myself. A massage sounded nice, but it meant making a reservation, getting myself somewhere at a certain time, and interacting with people, all things requiring energy I didn’t have. I needed decompression more than anything else.  

What my low-stakes solitude looked like: Some years my husband took the kids to the zoo so I could watch movies in my PJs, some years I walked around the neighborhood peering into little free libraries and sipping a cup of tea in the sunshine, and other years I went to the bookstore or fell into the woods or best of all, both.  

These days, I have one main guideline for Mother’s Day, borne of that low-stakes solitude realization: I don’t have to do anything for anyone else. I still plant a pot with my own mama and kids in honor of my grandma because I love doing it, but for the bulk of the day I just vibe, and it’s not spectacular, but it’s what I want.  

Find a way to get it more often 

Discovering what I wanted was essential, but the main reason I don’t cry on Mother’s Day anymore is I reclaimed space for myself the other 364 days a year. Mother’s Day was painful in part because it was just a day, and that wasn’t enough when the rest of the year was so hard.   

This entire holiday’s concept is a complete cluster, that like so many things, motherhood sets us up to fail — celebrating all moms for all they do on one single day, and of course giving them minimal to no help for the other 364 days of the year. 

It’s not enough, and it’s not okay.  

There are so many things that need to change at a societal level for moms (and all parents) to get the support they deserve, but rather than putting the burden of fixing that on us right now, we can think about where we might be able to carve out more space for ourselves in our own lives, and where we might find more support. 

That will look different for everyone, but part of the work I needed to do was readjusting my vision of myself as a mother from patient, selfless angel to kind and imperfect human who is there for you when you need her. 

I also needed to seek out support before I fell apart. Too often, my bar was “How much can I take?” rather than “What do I want?” 

Maybe the annual onset of spring can find us moms seeking out a little more joy, a little more solitude, and a lot less selflessness in our own wild and precious lives.  

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