Happy Fucking Mother’s Day

It’s Mother’s Day, and every year I find myself circling back to the same question: what does it actually mean to be a mother? This year, instead of keeping those reflections tucked away, I’m choosing to share them not as a blueprint or advice, but simply as one woman’s lived experience.

For years, I believed my job as a mum was straightforward: Protect my kids from harm. Keep them safe. Keep them fed. Keep them clothed. Keep the world from bruising them too much.

And I did try my best, with the skills, capacity, and self-awareness I had at the time. But hindsight has a way of illuminating the gaps we didn’t know were there. I can now admit, with a mix of sadness and compassion, that I wasn’t always emotionally available to my girls in their early years. Truth is, I wasn’t emotionally available to myself. I was busy surviving. Busy providing. Busy holding everything together, including an impossible relationship with their father.

In the early years,  I thought other mothers had the secret, some inner compass I was missing. But the truth is far less glamorous and far more human: every one of us is navigating motherhood with whatever tools we inherited, whatever wounds we’re still healing, and whatever scraps of wisdom we’ve gathered along the way.

Like any parent, I’ve always carried hopes for my children,  that they’d thrive in their own right, make choices that honour who they are, and learn from the mistakes I made. Over the years, I’ve shared those mistakes with them, just like my own mum tried to do with me. And just like I did with her, sometimes they listened… and sometimes they didn’t, because they believed they knew best.

That’s the cycle of growing up, isn’t it?

• Some days we get it right.
• Some days, we get it painfully wrong.
• Most days, we’re somewhere in the messy middle.

But we learn by doing. We learn by stumbling. We learn by apologising. We learn by trying again. And Again.

Motherhood isn’t a straight line. It’s a series of experiments, recalibrations, and quiet hopes that the things we got right matter more than the things we got wrong. In my case, in my quest to do my best, I realised something else: in my pursuit of being the perfect mum, I also became an emotional barometer, reading the room, absorbing their storms, and steadying myself so they didn’t have to steady me.

Their needs, their fears, their heartbreaks, they all came first. Over time, I have become skilled at swallowing my own feelings, postponing them, tucking them away so I could carry on as if everything was fine.

Not because anyone told me to.

But because that’s what mothers do when they’re trying to hold a world together. Trying to be steady for their children even while unravelling a little inside. But here’s the truth I’ve had to learn the hard way: that isn’t healthy either. The reality is we are all human. None of us is perfect [whatever fucking perfect even means]

So maybe the umbilical cord is never fully severed. Maybe it just changes shape. Maybe it becomes something less physical and more emotional, a thread of connection that stretches, tangles, frays, and repairs itself over time. And maybe the real work of motherhood and the work I’m still learning is allowing that cord to stretch in both directions.

Not just me holding them, but them seeing me. Not just me protecting their hearts, but me honouring my own.

So, this Mother’s Day, that’s the truth I’m sitting with:

• Motherhood isn’t about perfection.
• It’s about presence.
• It’s about growth.
• It’s about courage.

And it’s about learning to mother ourselves with the same tenderness we’ve always tried to give our children.

Happy Fucking Mother’s Day

Love Fordy

 

AKA Unapologeticwriter

 

Thank you for taking the time to read.

 

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