While We Still Can, Let’s Love Our Mums Loudly
- May 10
- 3 min read
It’s Mother’s Day which leaves me reflecting on the women who held more than we ever realised
Mother’s Day can stir many things. For some, it is joyful and noisy and full of flowers, burnt toast breakfasts, and children proudly carrying slightly lopsided handmade cards with glitter still falling off them by lunchtime. For others, it aches.
This week, we’ve spoken about some of the quieter griefs that sit around days like this - the people missing mothers, the people grieving pregnancies that never became children, the men who quietly longed to become fathers but never got there, and the people whose relationship with motherhood was far more complicated than the greeting cards suggest.
But somewhere in the middle of all those complicated human stories sits another truth worth saying out loud:
Many mums loved us in ways we did not fully understand until much later.
As children, we tend to think mothers simply exist, like electricity or gravity. Constant. Reliable. Permanent. Meals appear. School uniforms are washed. Appointments are remembered. Someone knows where your other shoe is. Someone notices when your voice sounds “off” before you even know you’re upset yourself.
It all feels ordinary at the time. It is only as adults, particularly once life begins tiring us in familiar ways, that we start to realise just how much of their own exhaustion many mothers quietly swallowed so we could feel safe.
The invisible labour of motherhood is extraordinary precisely because so much of it looks so unremarkable from the outside.
It is the staying awake until everyone gets home safely.
The mental lists that never stop running.
The lunchboxes packed while sick.
The pretending to be okay financially so the children do not worry.
The emotional buffering mothers perform inside households every single day without anybody formally acknowledging it.
So many mums carried entire family ecosystems quietly on their nervous systems while still somehow asking everyone else if they were okay. And most of us only fully see it later. Sometimes far too late.
That is one of grief’s crueller lessons: it often sharpens appreciation after opportunity has already begun disappearing. You hear yourself say something your mother used to say and suddenly understand her differently. You find yourself exhausted in the same places she once was. You realise the woman you thought “worried too much” was often simply carrying the emotional weight of an entire family while trying to make it look easy.
And suddenly all those ordinary moments become sacred in hindsight.
The phone calls.
The recipes.
The reminders to take a jumper.
The way she always waited awake until you got home.
The small rituals that once felt so permanent you barely noticed them happening.
So perhaps this Mother’s Day is simply a gentle invitation to pause long enough to notice.
To say the thing.
To make the phone call.
To stay at the table a little longer.
To hug your mum without rushing it.
To ask her about her life before she became “Mum.”
To remember that beneath motherhood was always a whole human being with dreams, fears, heartbreaks, and exhaustion of her own.
And if your mum is still here, love her loudly while you can.
Because one day, you would trade almost anything for one more ordinary conversation. One more cup of tea together. One more story you’ve heard a hundred times before. One more chance to say, properly and without embarrassment:
“Thank you. I see it now.”
And for the mothers reading this; the exhausted ones, the devoted ones, the imperfect-but-trying-with-everything-they-have ones, thank you too. For all the ways you turned up. Again and again and again. Even when nobody noticed.
Comments