Mother’s Day can be complicated for a number of reasons. If you are facing issues with infertility or pregnancy loss, yesterday was likely to bring up hard emotions. The same goes if you have recently lost your mother, or if your mother is sick or struggling. Everything in the media about Mother’s Day paints it as a joyous occasion to celebrate a particular type of mother—the ever-loving, supportive, caring mother. But not all of us had that mother. If your mother wasn’t the mother you needed, you may have a mother wound. Mother wounds run deep. When that first core attachment isn’t secure, for whatever reason, it affects how you relate to others throughout your life. Mother wounds can show up in other relationships as anxious attachment, fear of abandonment, or avoidance (aka “if I don’t get close, I won’t get hurt”). If you’re nodding along to this, you’re not alone. So many of us are working through childhood wounds in order to live fuller, healthier lives as adults. So many of us are learning that to find the love we really want, we have to start healing the wounds within us. When our primary caregiver isn’t there for us the way we need, our child brains think it is our fault. We start to question our worth and value. This is why we may not attract healthy people later in life. We attract the people we think we deserve, or we choose what feels familiar. When we start to heal those inner wounds and realize that how our mothers treated us was not a reflection of our worth and value, we can grow self-love and then attract healthier people. “Healing your mother wound does not mean mending an estranged relationship you have with her. It means healing the relationship you created with yourself as a result of the relation.” -@genellgorman Our suggestion : take some time to think about ways you can mother yourself. How can you give yourself the nurturing you didn’t get? When you think of the ideal mother, the mother you really needed, what qualities do those include? How can you translate those to ways you care for yourself? We are sending love to all of you.