Mother's Day is complicated for a lot of us. For some, it is a celebration. For others, it is one of the harder days on the calendar — the day you reach for your phone to call someone who no longer answers.
Mother's Day is complicated for a lot of us.
For some, it is a celebration — flowers, brunch, handmade cards with misspelled words, and the particular joy of being loved loudly by small people. For others, it is one of the harder days on the calendar. The day you reach for your phone to call someone who no longer answers. The day you sit with the weight of a relationship that was never what you needed it to be. The day you grieve the mother you lost, or the mother you wished you had, or the version of yourself you thought you would be by now.
If that is where you are this year, I want you to know: you are not behind. You are not broken. You are in a season.
I wrote The Time We Have because I needed to say something I had been carrying for a long time — that time is not something we manage. It is something we inhabit. And the season of grief, of transition, of becoming, is not a detour from your life. It is part of it. It is, in many ways, the most important part.
The change of seasons is not a sign that something went wrong. It is proof that something is still growing.
This Mother's Day, whether you are celebrating, grieving, or somewhere in the complicated space between the two — give yourself permission to be exactly where you are. The soft life is not about having everything figured out. It is about choosing gentleness with yourself, especially in the seasons that ask the most of you.
You are not stuck. You are in process. And that is enough.