The Angst of the Mother’s Day Card Dilemma

I found myself in the greeting card aisle again.

Mother’s Day approaching, the shelves bursting with flowers, glitter, and scripted words that felt like they were shouting at me.

A wall of pinks and pastels.
Heartfelt declarations.
And a quiet knot forming in my stomach many years ago now.

I picked up a card that read:

"Mom, you’ve always been my rock, my soft place to land."

Not quite.

Another:

"Your unconditional love has shaped every part of who I am."

Nope.

And then:

"You’ve loved me perfectly from the very beginning."

I had to set that one down fast. Each card felt like a betrayal of truth.

Too much.
Too sweet.
Too far from my experience.

Not because my mother and I didn’t love each other deeply.

But because the love we shared was complicated, and for many years, hard-won.

That’s what so few people talk about when it comes to Mother’s Day. That for a lot of us, the day brings up more than brunch and roses.

It brings up longing.
Confusion.
Sometimes grief.

And yet—dominant culture doesn’t really make room for that.
There’s no card that says:

"I see the effort you made and I’m still healing from what you couldn’t give."

Or,

"Happy Mother’s Day. We’ve come a long way."

Eventually, I found a plain card with just three words on the front:
Happy Mother’s Day.
No butterflies.
No florals.
No declarations of eternal closeness.

It felt simple and honest.
Not syrupy.
Not performative.
A gesture that acknowledged duty, and yes, love—but didn’t deny reality to get there.

That, I realized, was the most loving card I could offer.
One that honored the truth of the past and the boundary of the present.

And if you’ve ever stood in a card aisle with that same sinking feeling,
I want you to know:

You’re not broken.
You’re not ungrateful.
You’re not alone.

The tension you feel? That’s real.
And it’s not just you.

So many of us walk the line between gratitude and grief when it comes to our mothers. Especially those of us doing trauma-informed healing work.

For me, that healing changed everything.

I became my mother’s caregiver at the end of her life. And in that sacred space, we found something new—
forgiveness,
closeness,
deep recognition and mutual appreciation.

It didn’t erase the pain of the past, but it let love come through anyway.

I saw her not just as a mother, but as a woman.
A soul doing her best with the tools she had.
And with that shift, something opened in me.

I was no longer waiting for her to become what I needed: I was becoming that for myself.

That’s the real miracle of healing.
You stop trying to rewrite the old story,
and instead learn to be the kind of parent you always longed for.

Not just with your head,
but in your body.
In your spirit.

You learn to listen to your own needs.
To offer tenderness without self-abandonment.
To hold boundaries with kindness and strength.

This is the quiet, powerful work of re-mothering.
And it’s available to all of us—especially on days when the world wants to hand us someone else’s script.

And here’s something else we don’t talk about enough:

A complicated relationship with your mother can also impact how you relate to other women.

Sometimes it shows up as distrust.
Sometimes comparison.
Sometimes fear of intimacy.

That’s why being in spaces with boundaried, self-nurturing women can be so reparative.

It shows your nervous system a new template.
A new possibility.

Women who listen.
Who don’t demand you shrink.
Who hold space for your truth and theirs.

That’s what we practice together—in my 1:1 work and at my group offerings. We gather as we are, healing our wounds not just through words and intentions, but through embodied experience.

If this Mother’s Day feels tender, here are three ways to parent yourself with love:

1. Listen to your body, not the greeting cards.

Your nervous system might be carrying old imprints: tension, dread, longing, guilt.
Instead of pushing them away, try pausing and noticing what’s true in your body.
Put your hand on your heart.
Breathe.
Ask yourself, What would a loving parent do right now?
Even just witnessing your body’s truth with compassion is an act of healing.

2. Protect your energy with clear, kind boundaries.

You don’t have to attend events that feel performative.
You don’t have to pretend to feel something you don’t.
And if your mother (or her memory) still carries pain, you can bless her and still choose space.
Boundaries (no matter what culture we are from) are a form of love—especially when they keep you grounded in what’s real.

3. Offer yourself what you most needed and never got.

Did you need tenderness?

Encouragement?

Consistency?

Someone to remind you that you are good, worthy, safe?

Start there.

Write yourself a note.
Make your favorite childhood meal.
Light a candle and say the words you always wished someone would say. Be the mother now.
The one who sees you, believes you, celebrates your growth.

Mother’s Day doesn’t have to be about pretending.

It can be about honoring.
Honoring your mother for what she gave.
Honoring yourself for what you survived.
And honoring the work you’re doing now to become more whole, more free, more you.

That’s something worth celebrating.

And it doesn’t need glitter to shine.

Ready to give yourself the gift of nurturing, care and support this year? Join my intimate 7-night retreat this August in Greece. Get the details and celebrate yourself here.

The Circle of Life

It's the Circle of Life

And it moves us all

Through despair and hope

Through faith and love

Till we find our place

On the path unwinding

In the Circle

The Circle of Life

Tim Rice and Elton John

Like all young in the animal kingdom, I adored my mother when I was a small child. 

I was absolutely convinced that she was the best mom, the one who smelled the sweetest, the one whose arms were the most gentle, the one whose hands could stroke any pain or sorrow out of my curly brown hair simply by touching it.

Everything in my biology told me that this person was the key to my survival and, as such, she was the most important thing in my life. From an evolutionary perspective, the mother-child bonding occurred perfectly and without a hitch.

And in harmony with nature’s perfectly timed clockwork, whether lion cubs, puppies or kittens or baby ducks, eventually it came time for this new member of the tribe to look around and see the rest of the world. Very quickly, I especially noticed the other baby animals and their mothers, and that is probably when the fall from the pedestal began.

Indeed, for the next several decades of my life, I could only see how the other mothers nurtured their young, what they gave to them and what I wasn’t getting. It was especially prevalent with my aunt and cousins: she seemed to be the perfect mother, suckling her young in a way that made me wistful.

My mother’s way of raising me was, to put it mildly, far more unconventional. Because of her formative years and growing up, she was much more of the “let-her-figure-it-out-on-her-own” school. After all, she had done it and it had helped her survive as a young cub.

I was the kid who would be picked up hours after school had ended with a sheepish look on my face, the one who had to figure out how to make friends without a mom at home who knew my classmates’ names, the one who had to go outside of the small cocoon of the nuclear family to get basic needs met from a very, very young age. One of my other aunts tells the story of how, at the age of four, I would climb up on the kitchen cabinets to get cereal to make my own breakfast. She was appalled and judged my mother fiercely for that, as did I.

But the circle of life gives us opportunities to go back to the beginning and see things with a fresh perspective.

Nearly six years ago, when I was living in Europe, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer. From that very first phone call, I knew it was terminal and that there was no time to waste. Nature compelled me to return to my roots, to go back to the den and to see and accept this fierce lion as she truly was, not as I would have had her.

Two weeks ago today, my beautiful, fierce mother passed away after a long and valiant journey, not just through cancer, but through the pain and tragedy of her own years as a small, vulnerable cub with no one to consistently protect and nurture her in her formative post-war years in Greece.

We were given the opportunity, each in her own way, to let go of the mother and daughter that we had each wanted, and to fully, completely and whole-heartedly accept the other woman as a force of nature unto her own self.

Let’s face it, for all the times I judged and criticized her for not being Betty Crocker, I’m sure I wasn’t Daughter of the Year at all times.

As I sit in the grief and loss of this time, it is so clear that my mother was not only my greatest teacher in the Buddhist sense, but also did exactly what nature had compelled her to do: to create a young one strong and capable enough of fending for herself in the jungle.

It’s no accident – if you believe in that sort of thing – that we are both Leos, too. She didn’t do this by coddling me and making it easy and I can assure you there were many, many times I desperately wanted that. She did it by recognizing the truth of my spirit, honoring her own style of mothering and letting go of what the PTA ladies thought. Of the many, many gifts my mother gave me during her time here, the desire to seek and know my own truth and live it to the best of my ability was certainly one of the greatest.

The circle of life with my mother came full-circle in the days, months and years that I cared for her during her journey with cancer. When she passed, the only thing that remained was love, gratitude and forgiveness.

So many men and women I know stay perennially stuck in what they didn’t get and deserved as a child, what they were robbed of, how it is a wonderful excuse for not thriving today. I know it well because I, too, did it for a very, very long time. Indeed, I had to then, as it was an integral part of the slow, complicated process of healing and growing up. And I am so grateful for the teachers, counselors, coaches, friends and others who validated my experience and feelings while I went through it.

But while a child can be victim, as an adult, make no mistake about it: we are volunteers if we accept and embrace the burden of the victim story.

The men and women I know who thrive in this world are those who carefully, gently and methodically – and with the help of loving, compassionate witnesses – go through the stories of the past, grieve their losses, keep the stuff that continues to serve and empower them, and let go of what doesn’t.

My mother did a great, great thing by opening up to healing and forgiveness with me, too. She didn’t have to, but she chose to. And once more I adore my mother Lioness.  

We have once again come full circle.