When Mother’s Day isn’t a celebration: ‘I still cry for the mother I never had’ | Healthy

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. For many people a day of gifts, brunches and fun. But what if you have missed your mother for years, or never really had her? How do you deal with this and what can you do as an outsider to alleviate the suffering?

“I was 18 when my mother died quite unexpectedly,” says Myrna Derksen (38) from Utrecht. “She had been suffering from an autoimmune disease for a number of years, but it was only when she tried a new medicine that things went wrong. She was in a kind of coma for four weeks, but when she finally died, it was still a shock. Somehow I always had the idea that she would come home again.”

Twenty years later, the loss is still there. “With every big decision or event in my life I think: what would my mother have thought about this? I recently started my own business, and I would have loved to discuss it with her. The other day I was listening to Wende Snijders in the car and suddenly I started crying very hard. I may be able to imagine what she would have thought of it in the past, but I don’t know how she would look at me now. That hurts.”

Mother’s Day usually passes her by a bit. “And if I think a few days in advance: let’s do something fun, then of course no one can and that unexpectedly affects me.”

For people who have lost their mother or no longer have contact with her, Mother’s Day is often not a day of flowers and brunches, but a moment when the loss becomes even more apparent.

“What makes it difficult is that you are inundated with what it should look like,” says grief counselor Myrthe Geerts. “In commercials, on social media: everywhere you are addressed as if you have a mother. If you don’t have one, you fall outside the norm, as it were, and you can feel extra alone.”

“Even after a funeral you often hear: ‘Now you can close it down’, or: ‘Luckily you still have your father.’ All well-intentioned, but moments like these can make you stagnate in grief. Because it is so different from how you experience it.”

Even if a mother is still there, but there is no longer contact, Mother’s Day can be difficult. Such as Daisy de Meyer (33) from Sint Willebrord. Every Mother’s Day she posts the same quote from writer and psychologist Nina Mouton on her timeline: ‘I think of you, the one who mourns the mother you didn’t have, but whom you had hoped for.’

Throughout her childhood, she longed for her mother’s approval and love, but it never came. Thirteen years ago she broke off contact. “After my parents divorced, I went to live with my father. Contact with my mother remained difficult after that. I was allowed to come every other weekend, but when I went, she just wouldn’t let me in.”

“Still, I kept trying. Until at a certain point my father said: it’s over now. He didn’t want me to stand in front of that front door every time. It wasn’t until I was given the developmental psychology course at the age of 21 that I discovered that this was not a normal mother-child relationship.”

De Meyer finds the obviousness of Mother’s Day especially painful. “We live in a society in which people assume that you have a mother and that you also have a good relationship with her. While many people do not have one at all. I no longer cry for my mother. That great sadness has subsided after ten years. I still cry for the mother who I never had, but deserved. On Mother’s Day, that hits home even harder.”

Missing your mother has a major impact on your life, says Gerrie Reijersen van Buuren, contextual therapist. “I often explain it using an inverted triangle. At the top are your father and mother at the two points, at the bottom you are as a child. It remains that way for the rest of your life.”

“Your parents determine your development: they give you life and they are the ones you identify with. If one point is lost, the balance is disrupted. That is what you experience when you lose a parent: you have to re-ground yourself. The extent of that impact depends on the capacity of the other parent, or on people around you who can partly absorb that point.”

When that loss arises from human shortcomings, grief becomes even more complex, according to Gerrie Reijersen van Buuren. “It is dirty grief. In addition to sadness and loss, there is also anger, shame and the need to place the blame somewhere.” Moreover, it is not final. “There come times in life when you start to reconsider the lost contact, for example when you get older.”

What Reijersen van Buuren often sees happening is that people fill in for you what a day like Mother’s Day feels like, while that can be different for everyone. “A comment like: ‘This day must be difficult for you’ sounds very sympathetic, but it can also be counterproductive.”

“It is much better to ask an open question, such as: ‘How do you experience this day?’ And when you find out that someone’s mother has died, don’t say, “Oh, how awful,” or “Oh, how sad.” It’s not your job to find any of that suffering; at that moment you attract it to yourself. It is much better to ask: do you want to talk about that right now? Or would you like to tell us something about your mother? Give the other person freedom and don’t take over the conversation.”

And what can you do yourself? Geerts: “It helps to think about such a day in advance, so that you are less overwhelmed by emotions that you can’t deal with at that moment. When you have been missing someone for a long time, you often know what helps.

For some it means being among people, for others it means going to the beach to get some fresh air. Sometimes a small ritual helps, such as placing a bouquet of flowers that you would normally buy for your mother on the grave. Or just keep it yourself, because it’s difficult enough.”