To Those with Dead Moms or Sh*t Ones on Mother's Day...

If your mother’s dead like mine or if you currently have a shit mom, then you might feel how I feel on Mother's Day…sad, angry, jealous and profoundly heartbroken. If that’s not already bad enough, you’re then surrounded by people celebrating and rejoicing in gratitude for the exact same thing that has inflicted you so much pain.

Well, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I guess I’ll just avoid all social media, every restaurant specializing in brunches and bottomless mimosas, television, radio commercials, flower vendors, movie theaters, Starbucks and their Mother Day specials. I have to stay clear of every single place. Even driving off a cliff, I will surely come across Mother’s Day billboards and street venders selling last minute teddy bears and roses for the “World’s Best Mom” along the way.

So while you guys celebrate and honor your “World’s Best Mom,” are people like me just suppose to avoid life or pretend like this day doesn’t even matter when deep down we all know it does?

Nope.

I do not want to sit quietly in pain for being stripped of something that I had no control over. I do not want to hide out under my sheets and watch Netflix all day out of embarrassment for being unmothered. I do not want to feel lost and alone for being different than the rest of you with your perfect and heart-beating mothers. I do not want to feel forever fucked over and damaged for not having received guidance and unconditional love that the rest of you have so conveniently been given.

Instead, I will be honest with my feelings and share them… like how you share your gratitude for your mom on this day.

So today, I’m angry. (In case you couldn’t tell...)

And I want to normalize it. Not just the bitterness, but the whole whirlwind of feelings that those without mothers or with toxic and abusive mothers go through on this day. The ugly and the profound.

Yeah it fucking blows, man. My mother was murdered when I was a one year old baby. I never got to know her or find out what kind of mother she was even going to be. She will forever be without a wrinkle.

But I do know how I turned out to be and who I am becoming. Today after I feel ALL of my feelings and I mean ALLLLLLLLLLLLL of them, I will conclude the day by looking in the mirror. I’ll see a 35 year old woman who has been with the vulnerable baby Dixie who lost her mother and who has been with her the entire time. I will see my grandmother, my guardian angel, who raised me and truly saved my life. I will see my great grandmother, the only chord to my mother, who did the best that she could do. I will see my aunts who went above and beyond to make my life better. I will see neighbors, teachers, girlfriends and even women who I do not know. My mother’s mother and her mother and the mother after that. The thread of women who made the path for me to even be standing on my own two feet, let alone blog about it.

I will see my maternal identity within. I will see the mothering energy that has always been there and will always be there.

And then…I’ll see a wrinkle and will be okay with it.