For some, Mother's Day is a time to honor a parental figure. For others, especially queer and trans people, who may have been harmed or rejected by biological family, Mother's Day can be extremely painful. Here are a few self-care tips on how to cope on Mother's Day.
1) Deconstruct Mother’s Day for what it is, a part of the white supremacist, compulsory heterosexual/ cis gendered machine that makes anything that feels different, feel bad.
2) No one has a solid relationship with their mother, it’s fraught in more ways than ever really get said out loud.
3) Choose your chosen family if you have one, choose yourself if you can. The loneliness of Mother’s Day runs deep, but know that you are not the only one who feels like a mess around this.
4) Be super careful about body shaming on Mother’s Day. Parent/child relationships are ripe for body and fat shaming. This is usually the wound that started our life time of body shame. Nurture yourself, feed yourself.
5) Motherhood is romanticized. If this country was even remotely interested in honoring mothers, things would be really different. You can’t fix that in one day and if you are a mother, allow that in.
6) Stay home, make sure you know how to surround yourself with warmth and softness. Let what soothes you act as a surrogate parent today. Make sure your inner voice tries to honor the younger parts of you that need to be held.
7) Remember, Mother’s Day will be over soon. For most of us that is a good thing.
8) Allow for waves of grief, both if your mother is alive and has hurt you or if you have lost her. Mother’s Day and grief should be normalized as co-occurring.
9) It’s Mother’s Day, but you still need your Sunday. We all do. We have to be so careful around protecting the only days and times we have for refueling. Don’t let the demands of Mother’s Day diminish your whole week. And if they do, hold yourself gently around that too. Create healing time post Mother’s Day.
10) Tell one person (even yourself) the truth about how mothering or being mothered makes you feel. Your authentic reality, deserves naming.
11) Queer people parent each other, we often weren’t parented. Celebrate queerness today, subvert the disappearance of queerness and let’s acknowledge that we are ultimately holding each other.
If you're in need of crisis support or if you just need someone to talk to, please reach out to one of the resources below:
Trans Lifeline
Peer support & crisis hotline for trans people in English and Spanish. They do not employ nonconsensual emergency responder/police intervention.
US: 877-565-8860
Blackline
Crisis support through an unapologetic Black, LGBTQ+ & Black Femme lens; for BIPOC, by BIPOC. Based on info from Trans Lifeline, they do not employ nonconsensual emergency responder/police intervention.
1-800-604-5841
Crisis Text Line
Text HOME to 741741 anywhere in the U.S.
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