Mother’s Day is Complicated

Walk into any card aisle this weekend and you'll find the same words on repeat.

Nurturing. Loving. Sweet. Best friend. Always there.

I used to stand in those aisles and wonder if I was missing something.

My teenage mother lost custody of me before I was a year old. Just months before that, she had been hospitalized with a mental health crisis. Treatment options back then were not what they are today, and I can only imagine what that journey looked like for her. Somewhere in her late teens, she had a full hysterectomy. I've never gotten a clear answer about why, but given what I know now, I can only imagine the hormonal chaos that layered on top of an already fragile foundation.

Then she disappeared. Somewhere around the time I turned two, she was gone.

She reappeared around age five and exercised her parenting time sporadically after that. I have vivid memories of standing at our picture window in Manteno, Illinois, watching for her car. She said she was coming. But she didn't come.

When she did show up, I was excited to see her. What I witnessed during those visits was not something a child should carry. Parties with drugs and alcohol. Violence. I went into my first bar around age six so she could introduce me to her friends. I heard things from my bedroom that no child should hear. I learned to keep secrets without anyone ever having to tell me to keep them.

One night we were waiting for pizza at a takeout place. My mom was stressed. She had no childcare and needed to get to her bartending shift. A man waiting for his order offered to watch me. Even at that age, every alarm in my body went off. I stood there watching her actually consider it. Leaving me with a complete stranger - a man.

I was nine-years-old the night she called me after taking a large amount of pills and drinking. I stayed on the phone with her. I listened as her breathing became heavy, and as she lost consciousness. I heard the fire department break down the door. I heard them working on her, voices urgent and sharp, and then there was a click. They hung up. They didn't ask who was on the line. They didn't say a word. They just hung up the phone.

My aunt rushed me to the hospital… at my insistence. I was hysterical. When we arrived, my mother was conscious. She was screaming obscenities in my direction. The nurse told my aunt I was too young to be there, and we were made to leave.

I have never forgotten that night. I don't think I ever will.

I have deep compassion for my mother now. I am older, I understand more of her story, and I know she was fighting battles I couldn't see. But compassion and excuses are not the same thing, and I want to be clear about that. Understanding someone's pain does not erase what they did with it. My mother never took ownership. Not once. There was always an excuse, an inability to remember events, always a reason, always something that shifted the focus away from accountability. I spent years waiting for an apology that never came, and at some point I had to accept that it never would.

What that did to me, unexpectedly, was clarify exactly the kind of mother I was determined to be. I will always admit when I am wrong. I will always apologize to my daughters when I could have done something better or differently. Not because I am a perfect mother, but because I know what it costs a child to never hear those words from the person who was supposed to protect them. I know that cost in my bones.

I loved my mom.

And I learned, before I had words for any of it, that you can love someone completely and still have sky-high boundaries. That letting those boundaries down isn't always safe. By my early teens, I made the decision to cut off contact. It was the right decision for me and I don't regret it.

What keeps me up at night is knowing that a child in today's family court system wouldn't have that choice. Parental rights would override it. Someone would probably accuse my father of coaching me. Of alienation. I cannot imagine the layers of trauma that would have been stacked on top of an already impossible situation.

Given all of that, given everything I carried out of that childhood, I was terrified to become a mother.

Terrified.

Not because I didn't want to love someone that way, but because I wasn't sure I knew how. The blueprint I had been handed was complicated at best and dangerous at worst. When I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, something shifted that I still don't fully have words for. I found purpose. I found my reason to break cycles. Something that felt so much bigger than me.

Seven and a half years into my marriage, with two children under the age of five, I found myself inside the family court system. My daughters were failed by the system that was supposed to protect them. It took six years before anyone finally listened. If they had listened on day one, my daughters would have been spared six years of trauma.

Now they are both young adults. They are incredible. We overcame. My story has a happier ending than most, and I do not take that lightly. But being robbed of six years of a critical window in their lives, and then watching the system not apologize, not correct course, not even pause.

That part is unforgivable.

I've been sitting with all of this as Mother's Day arrives, thinking about the mothers in my family who came before me.

My grandmother was a victim of domestic violence. She was married to two abusers. One died and the other she couldn't leave. The resources didn't exist. The pathways out weren't there.

I remember my sweet grandmother fondly. She had hand tremors, which I have inherited.

I remember thinking it was funny when I was little. She'd carry her coffee cup across the room and it would spill over the edge every time.

Now my hand tremors too.

When it shakes, when I'm frustrated because my handwriting doesn't look the way it used to, when the embarrassment creeps in, I think about her. I think about the women before her. The ones who didn't have a voice. The ones who couldn't break cycles because the door was never opened for them.

This year, I pushed past the tremors and wrote cards. Just a few lines each. Sent them to the mothers in my life who I respect and care for. People who needed to know they were seen.

That's what this weekend has become for me.

Hallmark didn't build this holiday for us.

They didn't build it for the mom sleeping in her car. The grandmother raising her grandchildren because the system failed her child. The woman who became a mother against all odds and then had her children used as weapons against her. The woman estranged from her kids through absolutely no fault of her own, who will spend Sunday just trying to get through the day. The child, now an adult, who never had the mother the cards describe and is quietly grieving something that was never there to lose. The adults who had amazing mothers, who are no longer with us.

They built it for a version of motherhood that has never been most people's reality.

And if you're reading this, chances are your story is messy and complicated too. Many of you have been robbed, not just by a relationship that took more than it gave, but by a system that was supposed to protect you and your children and didn't. That failure has layers. The grief has layers. The anger has layers. And most of the world has no idea what you're carrying into this weekend while everyone else is posting brunch photos and bouquets.

So we make it what we need it to be.

We find our people. We mother each other. We hold space for the ones who are struggling. We use our voice for the ones who were silenced. We carry the cup, even when our hands shake, because the women before us carried it when everything was stacked against them.

If you're reading this and today is hard, I want you to know that you are not alone in that. Hard and meaningful can exist in the same day. Grief and gratitude can sit side by side. This community holds all of it.

I see you. I stand with you.

With love, Tina