This Mother’s Day, something deeper is alive in me
Mother’s Day has always been about honoring mothers. But this year it lands differently for me. Something older is alive in it.
My children are grown now. I have passed through many seasons of motherhood and each one required something different of me, of them, of all of us. What a profound initiation motherhood is.
And now I am on the other side of those early seasons — standing here looking back, and looking around. I can see the whole of it in a way I couldn’t when I was inside it. And what I feel when I look around at the women in my life — the ones newly pregnant, the ones deep in the thick of raising young children, the ones I mentor, the friends navigating their own parenting journeys — is wonder. Pure marvel. Knowing exactly what motherhood asks of us, and still finding the journey incredibly beautiful.
I think too of the stepparents, foster parents, adoptive parents — the people who chose to love a child not born to them. That love, extended without biological guarantee, without certainty it will ever be fully received, says something extraordinary about what human beings are capable of underneath all the noise.
I also want to honor those for whom this day carries grief. The people who long deeply for motherhood and have not been able to experience it. The people who have endured IVF, loss, disappointment, waiting, hope, and heartbreak in private. There is real grief in that longing. And it belongs here too.
The joy and the grief are not separate. We cannot name the beauty without naming what it also costs. A mother holds both. A life holds both.
And because I have lived it, I also know the other side. The part that doesn’t make it onto the cards.
The grief of miscarriage. The loss that has no ceremony, no witness, sometimes no language at all. You grieve something that existed and didn’t get to exist. A possibility. A future. A love that already had a name even if you hadn’t spoken it yet. A miscarriage is never expected.
And perhaps that is why what is happening in the world feels so personal to me this year.
We are living through a miscarriage of justice. Of shared human values. Of our collective right to exist in a peaceful world — to grow, to thrive, and to live with dignity.
We are not shocked because injustice is new. We are shocked because the scale of what we have been refusing to see has become impossible to look away from.
We didn’t just wake up one day to a new problem. We woke up to the truth that what we were building on was already cracked. Already distorted. And we kept building anyway. Kept looking away and hoped somebody else would take care of the problem.
The bedrock of our collective consciousness has been ruptured and exposed. And many of us are feeling the consequences of that rupture in real time.
The grief and disorientation so many of us are carrying right now feel familiar. They feel like the grief that arrives when something you believed would continue suddenly ends. When something fragile and precious is lost before it had the chance to fully become.
Motherhood knows this grief. And motherhood also knows what comes after it.
How do we keep loving in a world that feels fractured? How do we stay human while witnessing suffering, division, and fear? How do we resist becoming hardened by what we see?
I suspect many of us are asking this quietly.
The answer does not begin somewhere outside of us. It begins with honesty. With the willingness to go inward and notice where fear lives in us. Where separation lives in us. Where we have stopped seeing each other clearly.
And then to ask: is there enough room in me for all of us?
Because the future is not built through outrage alone. It is built through what we continue to nurture, protect, and choose — together.
Right now, in this particular moment of reckoning, there is an opportunity to remember who we are. To remember that hatred often grows from fear — from places in us that have forgotten how to trust one another. Beneath all of it, there is still a part of the human spirit that knows how to love. That knows how to keep going. That refuses to stop believing in what is possible.
Faith does not require certainty. It requires the willingness to believe something more beautiful is possible, even while standing in the middle of what feels broken.
And when we come together in that shared willingness — to see each other more clearly, to love more honestly, to act with greater courage — something begins to move.
This impulse to protect, to nurture, to love fiercely — it is not limited to mothers. It lives in every human being on this earth.
And perhaps that is where it begins — not in certainty, but in how we choose to care for one another now.
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With love,
Veronica
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