Mother’s Day means something different to almost everyone.

Mother’s Day means something different to almost everyone.

For some people, today is one of the best days of the year. Breakfast made by small hands, maybe burned a little. A phone that hasn’t stopped. A feeling of fullness that is hard to describe and easy to receive.

For others, today is complicated. The relationship with your mom was hard, or it was good and then it wasn’t. She is gone now, and the absence doesn’t get as easy as people say it does.

For some, today is genuinely painful. You wanted to be a mother and it hasn’t happened. You have been carrying that quietly, and today has a way of making quiet grief loud. And for some reading this, you are a mother who has buried a child. No one talks enough about what a day like today does to you.

Whatever today feels like for you, you are not invisible. This is a day worth celebrating, and it is also a day worth being honest about. Those two things can be true at the same time.

There is something women carry that is difficult to put into words, but most of us have seen it up close. A particular kind of presence. An attentiveness to people that changes the rooms they walk into. The ability to hold someone’s pain without trying to fix it immediately or move past it too quickly. I have seen it in my wife Sandy for years. The way she notices things I walk right past. The way she holds space for our kids when they are hurting, in a way that I genuinely have to work at and she simply does.

Mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. Women who stayed up at night with sick kids. Who said the right thing at the right moment even when they were running on empty. Who prayed for their children when they couldn’t sleep and kept showing up when showing up cost them something. That work will never make a headline, but it echoes for generations. It is some of the most important work being done on this earth.

Mother’s Day can also feel like a day with a category for some women and not others, and that is worth pushing back on. If you never had children, by choice or by circumstance or by a grief you are still carrying, you are not less.

The world is full of people who are alive differently because of a woman who was not their biological mother but showed up like one. A teacher. An aunt. A mentor. A woman at a church who saw something in a kid that no one else was seeing and refused to look away. That is mothering. It does not require biology. It requires love, presence, and the willingness to give yourself to someone else’s becoming. Every woman has done that for someone. Maybe you know exactly who. Maybe you won’t know until much later. But it happened, and it counted.

If you lost your mom, grief does not follow a calendar. Missing her today is not weakness. It is love with nowhere to go right now, and that love was real. If you longed to become a mother and it didn’t happen the way you hoped, your longing was not wrong and it was not a failure. It was something beautiful in you, and the fact that it hasn’t been filled the way you imagined does not diminish you. God sees that ache. It has not gone unnoticed. And if you are a mother who has lost a child, there are no words that are enough. But this is worth saying: you are still their mother. That does not end. The God who sees every sparrow that falls has not looked away from you for a single moment.

Proverbs 31 says that a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised, that her works will speak for her, and that the people whose lives she has touched will rise up and call her blessed. To every woman who has loved people at cost to herself, who has given when she was empty, who has shown up in ordinary ways that were anything but ordinary: thank you.

You are seen. And what you have given to the people around you matters more than you probably know.