The Emails Start in April
The first email arrives in April, and your body knows it before you do. "Gifts for Mom." Then another. "Get mom something she really wants this year." Then ten more. "Last-minute gift ideas for the mom who has everything." Within days, your inbox has decided that Mother's Day is coming and that you should feel a certain way about it.
You might not notice the shift right away, but your body does. A heaviness settles in when you scroll past the subject lines. Something in your stomach tightens, briefly, before you delete and move on. It's been doing this every spring for longer than you can remember.
The Holiday That Tells You How to Feel
Mother's Day operates on a single assumption: that the relationship between a mother and her child is uncomplicated enough to fit on a greeting card. Grateful. Loving. Tender. Celebratory. For some people, that's true. For many others, the second Sunday in May is something to endure.
Maybe you're the adult child buying a card for a mother who wasn't safe, standing in the aisle reading inscriptions about unconditional love and trying to find the one that's technically accurate enough to hand over without your chest constricting. Or buying the expensive one because the price can say what you can't.
Maybe you're the woman who does the emotional and logistical labor of mothering every other day of the year, and Mother's Day doesn't celebrate that labor so much as confirm it. You organize brunch for your own mother or your partner’s mother. You coordinate everything else that has to happen before Sunday afternoon, and by the time anyone turns to you and says "Happy Mother's Day," you're already spent. The day that was supposed to be yours got consumed by everyone else's needs. Again.
This list isn't the whole list. There are griefs this holiday walks into that don't have a card either.
The Opt-Out
A few years ago, retailers started sending a different kind of email before Mother's Day. The version from one department store says something like: "We know Mother's Day can be a tough time. If you'd rather not receive related emails, opt out below."
It's kind. It's also the most the culture knows how to offer. We've gotten far enough to acknowledge the pain, but the solution is that we'll stop reminding you. As if the emails were the problem.
You can unsubscribe from a mailing list. You can't unsubscribe from the restaurant specials on every block, the Instagram posts, the grocery store parking lots being overtaken with wilting flowers. You can't unsubscribe from the look on someone's face when they mention their plans and then realize, too late, that they should not have asked about yours. The holiday is ambient. It is everywhere. And for six weeks, your nervous system knows it.
What Your Body Remembers
If Mother's Day has been complicated for years, or decades, your body doesn't wait for the actual day to respond. It starts in April. The first email is enough.
This is what clinicians call an anniversary reaction, a term usually associated with the date of a death or a specific event. But the body doesn't require a calendar to know that something is coming. If the month of May has historically meant bracing, performing, or pretending for most of your life, your system begins mobilizing weeks before the brunch reservation. The anticipation is the activation.
Which is why the holiday can feel so disproportionately heavy. Six weeks of accumulation arrive at one Sunday. By the time you sit down across from your mother, or your mother-in-law, or no one at all, the body has already been working for over a month. The fatigue that hits by Sunday evening isn't really about brunch. It's the weight of a season your nervous system has never learned to move through without bracing.
Because no one talks about the buildup, most people assume the problem is them. That they're being dramatic about a Hallmark holiday. That they should be over this by now. That gratitude should be easier to locate.
None of that is accurate. Your body is doing exactly what it learned to do. The response is old, and it is faithful, and it does not care that you're forty-three now and have your own life. It fires the same way it always has.
What There Is Instead of an Opt-Out
There is no unsubscribe link for any of this. But there is something the opt-out emails will never offer, which is permission to have the experience you're actually having.
Not the one the cards describe. Not the one the brunch assumes. The real one, with all of its contradictions, where longing for a mother you didn't have lives next to grief at being unseen as the mother you are or thought about being, alongside the complicated math of love and resentment and obligation that doesn't resolve into a single feeling no matter how many years you work on it.
The body can hold those contradictions. It's been holding them. What it hasn't had, in most cases, is company while it does.
If something here sounds familiar, I'd be glad to talk.
Margaret Sigel is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in Santa Monica, California, specializing in somatic therapy for anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She works with adults in person and online throughout California.