Yesterday was Mother’s Day and mostly everyone I know is a Mother including my sisters. I chose not to have children of my own. That’s beside the point.
Mother’s Day is a celebration filled with brunches, flowers, and handwritten cards. For others, it’s a reminder of something that’s missing. But there’s a quiet, often overlooked space in between: the experience of not losing your mom, but never really having her in the first place.
My mother left when I was about nine months old. I was barely learning how to walk while she was losing herself in the grip of cocaine. She wasn’t taken from me by tragedy or time—I didn’t grow up knowing her and then losing her. She was simply… absent. Physically alive but gone.
Growing up without a mother wasn’t just hard—it was isolating as a kid. It meant sitting through Mother’s Day art projects in school. It meant kids teasing me about being the only one who didn’t have a mom picking me up from school. It meant hearing whispers, sideways glances, and questions I couldn’t answer. I didn’t have grandparents or knew my dad’s sister at the time (until after college). I do have an uncle and my aunt, who did a few years ago, I would see on the Winter Holiday.
However, my dad was always there. Even though he is legally blind, and somehow still seeing the very best in me. He raised me on his own, in a world that wasn’t built to support men like him or kids like me. He didn’t just play both roles—he became the parent I needed, even when it wasn’t easy for either of us.
There’s a different kind of grief as a child growing up not knowing what you missed. You don’t mourn memories—you mourn the possibility of what could have been. That pain is harder to explain, harder to name because you are ridiculed for not having. This was the 90’s where most children had a mother figure in the household and possible a deadbeat dad.
Tell me this, how do you describe the absence of a relationship that never truly existed?
How you explain that your mother wasn’t there? I never used the word “mom”. I literally called her by her first name. I’m not mad nor traumatized. I’m not even mad at her because life is hard and she didn’t have a lot of support until it was too late and she ended up hurting everyone including my dad.
Mother’s Day doesn’t bring up memories of breakfast in bed or laughter in the kitchen. It brings up questions. Who would I be if she had stayed? If I had been given the chance to say “Mom” and have it mean something real?
To the single dads, the guardians, the grandparents who stepped up—thank you. You made room for love where others left a void.
So this Mother’s Day, I’m not mourning what I lost. I’m honoring what I overcame.
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