The day after Mother’s Day can leave people feeling emotional in ways they didn’t expect. Because the truth is, Mother’s Day is not easy for everyone.

For some, it’s beautiful. For others, it brings grief, longing, sadness, anger, emptiness or reflection. It can stir memories of mothers we’ve lost, relationships that were painful, estrangement, adoption, infertility, or the feeling of never truly being emotionally seen.

Ironically, today I worked with two men who have healed much of their mother wound. Both spoke differently. There was more openness, more emotional availability and more peace within themselves. One had recently reconnected with his mother for the first time in many years. Before our work together, he felt lost within himself and struggled to fully show up in his relationship. Much of the relationship had become toxic because of the unresolved pain he carried around his mother. Reconnecting did not erase the past, but it softened something in him.

The other is beginning to understand how he has spent much of his life unable to ask for what he truly needed in relationships. Instead, he learned to suppress his needs, stay silent and adapt himself emotionally around others. Beneath that was a deep fear of not being loved, rejected or abandoned.

It made me reflect on how deeply our relationship with our mother shapes us. How do you receive a mother’s love? What does mothering mean to you? Was it safety, affection, warmth and protection? Or was it distance, unpredictability, criticism or emotional absence?

So much of our adult relationships are shaped by these early experiences, often without us even realising it.

So this evening I felt compelled to write to you because the day after Mother’s Day is often where the real feelings sit. Not in the flowers, the  lunches or the photos, but in the truth of what someone has lived and what their heart has carried for a very long time.

And perhaps tonight is also a moment to reflect on our mothers as human beings. Women shaped by their own childhoods, wounds, losses and unmet needs. Most loved us the best way they knew how, with the emotional capacity they had at the time.

That does not erase pain, and it does not dismiss the experiences many people carry. But there is something deeply sacred in remembering that without them, we would not be here.

So when you go to sleep tonight, place your hand on your heart for a moment and thank your mother for your life.

Because through her, life moved forward into you.

Have a beautiful evening. xx