When Mother's Day Hurts: Holding Grief, Joy, and Everything In Between

A recap of Heart Broken, Heart Open: Taking a Pulse Before Mother's Day

There is no holiday quite as quietly brutal as Mother's Day for those of us who are grieving. The cards arrive in the mail. The brunch ads start running in mid-April. The phone alerts begin asking what you'd like to send "Mom" this year. For people whose mothers have died, whose mothers were complicated or harmful, who lost children of their own, who longed for motherhood and could not reach it, who are mothering people separated from them by borders or war, the day arrives like a wound reopened.

That was the premise behind Heart Broken, Heart Open: Taking a Pulse Before Mother's Day, the gathering Reimagine hosted on May 6, just days before the holiday. The intention, set by host Andy Ingall, was simple and refreshingly direct from the first minute: Mother's Day can suck. And acknowledging that, openly and together, can be its own kind of medicine.

What followed was 90 minutes of poetry, music, memoir, and ceremony, led by a roster of writers, artists, and educators who live in the intersection of grief and creative practice: poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, jazz vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles and pianist Jarrett Cherner, memoirist and television writer Angela Nissel, playwright and humorist Andy Corren, and educator and mental health advocate Tlazoltiani Jessica Zamarripa.

This is what we learned.

Grief Doesn't Care About Logic

Angela Nissel, whose new memoir Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead just hit shelves, opened the gathering with a story that anyone who has lost someone will recognize. Fifteen years after her mother's death from cancer, she still remembers the billboard that went up on the corner near her home. A bald, smiling little girl with hair growing back in. The word Perseverance. The phrase Pass it on.

"My mom didn't beat cancer," Angela said. "Her hair would never grow back. My mom did everything right. She was strong, she had faith, she did the treatments, and no one honored her with a billboard because she didn't persevere."

She was furious at a child she had never met. And she knew, even in the middle of that fury, that her anger didn't make sense. But that, she said, is the thing nobody warns you about. "Grief doesn't care about logic. Grief takes something that's meant to be beautiful and turns it into something painful."

What Angela offered, in the space of a few minutes, was permission. Permission to be angry at billboards. Permission to scream at your phone when it asks what you want to buy your mother for Mother's Day. Permission to let grief look like whatever it actually looks like, and not the well-behaved version we are taught to perform.

Both Things Are True at the Same Time

If there is a single sentence from this gathering that captures the heart of post-traumatic growth, it may be this one, also from Angela: "Grief isn't just about losing someone. It's about trying to figure out how to exist in a world where both things are true at the same time, where someone's miracle can sit right next to your pain and your loss."

This is the work. Not getting over it. Not moving on. Not performing closure. Just learning to hold the contradiction. The little girl on the billboard was a miracle. Angela's mother was lost. Both things are true. A child grown is a miracle. A child not carried to term is a loss. Both things are true. A mother is a blessing. A mother can also be the person you survived. Both things are true.

The capacity to sit with that paradox, rather than rushing to resolve it, is one of the quiet hallmarks of growth after trauma.

Laughter Is Medicine

Andy Corren, whose viral obituary for his "loud, filthy-minded" mother Renee became the basis for his memoir Dirtbag Queen, brought a different gift to the conversation: humor as a vehicle for love. Renee, he told us, "laughed a lot, and required a lot of forgiveness." His entire creative life, he said, came out of those two things — the laughing, and the forgiving. He read a passage about watching Hollywood Wives with his mother on a heated waterbed in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the kind of intimate, specific memory that turns grief into something you can actually hold.

When asked what he plans to do this Mother's Day, which falls on what would have been Renee's 89th birthday, Andy said simply: "Make a cake."

Tlazoltiani Zamarripa, who anchored the gathering with an opening blessing and the closing honor ceremony, named the same medicine in her own tradition. "In Curanderismo," she said, "that's a remedio, that's a curacion. To laugh out loud."

Laughter is not a denial of grief. It is one of the things that makes grief survivable.

All of Us Are Nurturers

One of the gentlest and most important reframes of the event came from Sarah Elizabeth Charles, the jazz vocalist whose recent album Dawn draws on her journey through miscarriage, birth, and motherhood. Performing alongside her partner Jarrett Cherner, she paused to remind everyone watching that motherhood is not a category reserved for the people who hold the title.

"We all birth and nurture things," she said. "Motherhood and parenthood isn't reserved for the people who do it, or are named those things in life."

For anyone who has poured themselves into raising a community, a creative project, a younger sibling, a student, a movement, a garden, or another person's child, this is a Mother's Day worth claiming. The bandwidth of nurturance is wider than the holiday usually admits.

Jarrett, who lost his own mother six years ago, added a quieter observation that stayed with the room. While cleaning out his voicemails, he came across messages she had left him years before, and her voice landed exactly as it always had. "Something can feel so far away," he said, "and yet still so present."

Community Grief Is Real Grief

Hala Alyan, the Palestinian American poet whose new memoir I'll Tell You When I'm Home explores motherhood through surrogacy, displacement, and inherited trauma, named the kinds of grief that often go unnamed: disenfranchised grief, ambiguous grief, the grief of infertility, the grief of inheriting a family's exile. Her writing makes space for losses that the dominant grief vocabulary tends to skip past.

Tlazoltiani brought that same expansion into the room when she spoke about the mothers in her own community right now, "being ripped away from our children, who are being kidnapped for having brown, Latino, Mesoamerican, Indigenous features." This, too, is grief. This, too, deserves a holiday acknowledgment. The impulse to keep our personal grief separate from collective grief, she suggested, is one of the lies society tells us. "As humanity, we're just one big organism."

To grieve well, we have to grieve together, and we have to grieve everything.

From Surviving to Flourishing

Reimagine's work is rooted in the science of post-traumatic growth, the body of research showing that adversity, when met with support and meaning-making, can become the soil for new purpose, deeper relationships, and renewed appreciation for life. Tlazoltiani named this in her own words near the end of the ceremony: "Transforming the surviving into flourishing."

That is what Heart Broken, Heart Open offered. Not a fix. Not a roadmap. A circle of people willing to say out loud that this Sunday is hard, and that the hardness itself can be honored.

If you are approaching Mother's Day with a heart that feels broken, we hope it can also be open. Open to laughter. Open to anger. Open to ritual. Open to the people, living and gone, who shaped you. Open to the possibility that you are nurturing something in this world right now that is worth being celebrated.

Watch the full recording of Heart Broken, Heart Open below.