Sharing your Mum on Mother's Day

We all know that Mother’s Day can be a painful day for many members of our community: those who wish to be mothers, those who have lost their mothers, or perhaps those who have a difficult relationship with their mothers.

I am one of four children who adore our mother and we love to spoil her, especially on Mother’s Day. As a fostering family, there is often another child in our house who can’t spend the day with their mother. Their feelings towards her can be complicated because their life before they came to live with us was complicated too. Out of the five children in my house on Mothering Sunday, there are two very different experiences and hundreds of feelings. Mother’s Day is an incredibly mixed day for us.

I was blessed enough to grow up naïvely thinking that Mother’s Day was just another nice family celebration. I have a lovely, kind mother who I can hug and talk to every day. I thought that everyone had that, too. Why would you not wake up in the same house as your mum on Mother’s Day and deliver some slightly burnt toast to her room at the crack of dawn, accompanied by a hand-made card?

Mother’s Day is not so simple for me anymore. I remember having the sobering realisation when I was fifteen that not everyone has a mother who cares for them, cooks them dinner and turns up to watch their school play. We had a child in our house whose Mummy had not turned up for their honorary Mother’s Day earlier that week. He had made a card and picked some flowers, but he had nobody to give them to. That Mothering Sunday had to be a quiet day where we tried not to remind him that he was the only person in the house who couldn’t talk to their Mum that day. It was strange not to spend all day chatting about how wonderful my Mum was, but we all understood. We all grieved with him that day.

All of the children in my family love my Mum, but the ones who we foster also love their own mothers. My Mum is their ‘Pip’ but she is not, and never could be, their mother. I share my Mother’s Day with those children and all of their feelings: gratitude, anger, grief, pain, envy. We just take Mother’s Day as it comes. We make sure that the children in our house know that we love them, their Mums love them and that we are trying to understand.