This Mother's Day, I'm not waiting.

For years, Mother’s Day arrived and along with it came an ache in my heart — hoping someone would notice, would remember, would think to do something that made me feel seen. And sometimes they did. And sometimes they didn’t. And either way, I found myself measuring my worth against the gesture.

This year, something shifted.

I’ve decided not to outsource my nourishment to anyone else's memory or initiative. Not because I'm closed off to receiving — I'm not — but because I am done making my care contingent on someone else's capacity to give it.

So I ordered the organic cotton pyjamas I'd been eyeing for months. Soft, simple, mine. I found the slippers that made me feel like a woman who takes herself seriously. And I booked the treatment at the day spa — not as a reward for surviving, but as a baseline. As something I simply deserve because I exist and I give and I pour out, and that pouring needs a source.

There is something profoundly clarifying about deciding: I will not wait.

Not in resentment, nor resignation — but in sovereignty.

If you are a mother — of children, of ideas, of communities, of other people’s becoming — this is your permission slip, though you never needed one from me. Nourish yourself this week with the same tenderness you extend so freely to everyone else. Book the thing. Buy the thing. Rest. Eat slowly. Do less than you think you should.

You are not a resource. You are a person.

And people need to be replenished.

Happy Mother’s Day to every woman who is learning, slowly and on her own terms, to come home to herself. 🤍

Image of myself with my daughter Caerulea, by Aleira Moon