Friday, May 15th
So, l
ast week I showed up to volunteer for Watch Love Grow’s A Mother’s Love project in Charlotte. The one where Ashley Manning and her army of humans deliver flowers and gifts to bereaved mothers on Mother’s Day. Seven hundred mommas this year. Seven. Hundred.
I want to be honest about something, because I think a lot of us carry quiet versions of this… When I was little, Mother’s Day was the easiest day on the calendar. I had the best mom. Like, the best. So we celebrated her, and I felt full, and that was that.
Then my 20s happened. And something shifted, the way it tends to for a lot of us, when life starts looking different than we thought it would. I wasn’t a mom. My body hadn’t done the thing other women’s bodies were doing. I’m a step-mom — and my stepkids have a wonderful mother, which I genuinely love about our family. I’ve always believed family comes in different shapes. But on the Hallmark-y days, the ones with the big call-outs? Something in me would whisper, ” You’re not enough.” For reasons we don’t need to unpack here.
So for a stretch, I kind of hated Mother’s Day. Quietly. Politely. While still posting the flowers.
And then I walked into Watch Love Grow.
Here is what I didn’t expect: standing in that space, surrounded by women honoring mothers who have lost children, mothers carrying a kind of grief I don’t pretend to understand, something in me loosened. Because Mother’s Day isn’t a single story. It’s a hundred stories happening at once. Joy. Ache. Memory. Longing. Showing up for someone else’s hard thing while quietly carrying your own.
That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
I wasn’t there as a mom. I was there as a woman. A presence. A person who could carry flowers and remember someone else’s child by name. And in doing that, I think I gave my own complicated feelings a little more room to breathe.
So here’s my Happy Mother’s Day — late, but said with my whole chest:
To the moms. To the step-moms. To the women who mother in a thousand quiet ways that don’t show up on a registry. To the women who are moms and are missing the child they should be holding today. To the women whose moms have passed. To the women still figuring out where they fit in all of it.
You’re a presence in someone’s life. That counts. That has always counted.
And thank you, Ashley, for building something that lets the rest of us show up for each other in the tender places. You’ve created a kind of remembering this city didn’t know it needed.
If you don’t know Watch Love Grow yet — go meet them: watchlovegrow.org. Volunteer next year. Nominate a momma. Donate. Whatever feels right.
We’re all just walking each other home.
xo, Carla V