If Mother's Day is complicated for you, I wrote this for you.

Mother's Day is this Sunday and I am sending so much love to all of the folks identifying as moms and caregivers on this special day. I hope you get all the virtual and physical flowers you so deserve.

I am also holding space for everyone who is carrying something heavier this weekend.

Let me start by saying, I know what it is like to dread a calendar date.

To count the days until it is over. To sit in a Teams call on a Friday afternoon while colleagues go around the room sharing their weekend plans and feel your body quietly leave the conversation before your mouth does. To smile and nod and say something vague and hope nobody asks a follow up question. To spend the next 48 hours in a kind of low grade survival mode that nobody around you can see. I slept through my first Christmas going through estrangement on an edible in an AirBnB in another country I could barely afford.

From my own lived experience alongside years of equity and inclusion work, I learned that the hardest part is often not the day itself. It is the week leading up to it. The assumptions. The well meaning questions from people who have no idea what they are walking into.

"How are you celebrating your mum this weekend?" "You should really call her. Parents sacrifice everything." "Family is everything. You only get one." "You should have kids, you've been together so long."

These things are said with love. And still, love without awareness can cause harm without anyone intending it.

What strikes me every time is how quickly we use our own lived experience as a compass for someone else's. How our access to a loving family, an uncomplicated relationship, a straightforward holiday can quietly become the invisible good person barometer we hold everyone else to without even realizing it.

Just like you would not assume someone is fine because they are smiling, you cannot know what a calendar date means to someone from the outside.

You cannot know that the colleague who went quiet when you asked about Mother's Day brunch spent last year's Mother's Day in a hospital after a miscarriage that nobody outside her household knows about.

You cannot know that the person who changed the subject when you brought up calling your parents has spent years in therapy processing harm that happened in childhood at those parents' hands. That they are not just grieving the relationship they lost or left. They are grieving the one they never got to have. The version of this holiday that passed them by every year while everyone else seemed to receive it so easily. That kind of grief does not have a clean name and it rarely gets a card.

You cannot know that the person who said they were not really celebrating is on their third round of IVF, watching their savings disappear, and has quietly stopped telling people because the sympathy is starting to feel worse than the silence.

You cannot know that the gender diverse person on your team who parents beautifully and loves fiercely does not get called a mother by the people in their life and is spending this weekend pretending that does not hurt.

You cannot know that the person trying to keep to themselves lost their mother recently and did not want to spend their remaining capacity receiving messages from around the office drawing attention to it.

You cannot know that the person who is more distant than usual is pulling away to avoid explaining how complicated they feel never having got to meet their birth mother and reconciling why they were not in their life.

You cannot know that the person who seems totally fine is counting down the hours until Monday.

Celebrate the people you love this weekend. And hold a little extra space for the possibility that not everyone around you is in the same place.

That joy and grief can coexist in the same Slack channel, the same family dinner, the same Sunday. Sometimes the most generous thing we can offer is simply to pause before we ask, and to let someone go quiet without following them there.

If this weekend is sitting heavy for you, I see you. You do not have to explain yourself to anyone. You do not have to perform okayness. You are allowed to feel whatever you feel about this day without apology and without justification.

This is part of why I built Blooming Rose the way I did. Because I know firsthand that some of us need a different kind of entry point into feeling well. One that does not assume we are starting from okay.

And if what you need this Sunday is a space that asks nothing of you except to arrive as you are, Blooming Rose Reiki will be open. As a small gesture of care, all sessions this Sunday are 40% off for anyone who could use a little extra support this weekend. No explanation needed. Book through the link below.

Whatever this Sunday holds for you, I am holding space for the full reality of it.

With care, Bridgette🌹