Mother's Day 2025
A Poem to Grieving Mothers
It’s Mother’s Day, 2025, and I am not thinking along the lines of commercialized Mother’s Day, a holiday that drives holiday card sales, floral sales, jewelry sales, prix-fixed menus in restaurants and long lines—if you can get in at all.
I am not thinking of the mothers wearing corsages and photographed in the middle of their perfect, smiling families.
I am thinking today of mothers who endure loss and disappointment, grief and pain.
Mothers whose children are not, mothers whose children are lost, mothers who have had a hole ripped in their heart that cannot be filled again.
Growing up, I knew two mothers whose sons had died, and both of these women said that they had never recovered. Each year as the anniversary of their child’s death came, they entered a period of darkness and sorrow.
My birth mother never recovered from giving me up, although her life went on for many years.
There are mothers whose children have died by suicide, mothers whose children are imprisoned, mothers whose children are currently lost in a world of drug addition, mothers who look on helplessly while their children are locked in destructive relationships.
Mothers in Gaza whose children are not, mothers whose children have been lost to war and senseless violence.
Mothers whose children died in the womb, mothers whose children died at birth, mothers of children who died in their cribs, women who wanted to be mothers but could not be.
Mothers whose empty arms hold a weight of sorrow in them equal weight of the spinning earth.
Even as they carry on being the mother who receives flowers, jewelry, Mother’s Day cards, and love from their remaining children; even as they swallow their tears and carry on smiling in their photographs today.
Sending all of you mothers, fierce love today.
© Janell Strube, May 11, 2025
Beautiful!
What a compassionate post.