Many of us walk into Mother’s Day carrying something complicated. Here are four versions of Sunday, and what might help with each.
We want Mother’s Day to be about flowers and chocolates. The petrol station has been stocking bouquets for two weeks. The department stores are three rows deep in $79 candles called Tuscan Reverie and Salted Calm.
The truth is more complicated, especially for those of us in the sandwich generation.
For me, it’s personal. I have a complicated relationship with my mum. I’m working on it. It’s not easy. And I think every week about how many other women in the sandwich generation are walking into Sunday with their own version of complicated.
Writing about it is one of the things that helps. The Club Sandwich inbox makes it clear I’m not the only one. So do my friends, texting me about which doctor’s appointment to drive Mum to first. So do my colleagues, stepping out of meetings because the aged care home rang. So does every column and Sunday morning radio segment in May. The pattern is consistent. For many of us, Sunday holds versions Hallmark didn’t print.
None of them fit in a bouquet. Here are the four, and what might help with each.
1. The mum who’s still here, but the relationship has flipped
This is the largest group, and the least written about. She’s alive. She’s ageing. The relationship has quietly inverted, gradually then suddenly, like a coin you didn’t see toss.
Listeners write in about booking their mum’s doctor’s appointments and driving her to them. Reading her blood results before she does. Doing up her seatbelt. Holding her elbow on the kerb. Listening more than they’re talking, and noticing.
Clinical psychologist Jo Lamble described that flip on this week’s episode of Club Sandwich: “It is a huge shift. One minute you’ve got your mum who’s loved you and cared for you and worried about you. The next minute you notice you are actually worrying more about her.”
Sarah Macdonald, the host, puts it like this:
“Every day is Mother’s Day for me now. If I’m not with Mum, I’m thinking about her. I’m doing admin for her.”
That’s the sound of a generation. Two-thirds of Australia’s primary carers are women. The flip is the central plot of midlife. The cards in the supermarket aisle haven’t caught up.
It can become a quiet protection racket: she’s hiding things from you so as not to worry you, and you’re doing the same back. Both of you are paying tax on a fiction.
2. The mum who wasn’t there
For some of you, Sunday is harder still, because the mother at the centre of it didn’t show up the way you needed her to. Maybe she left. Maybe she stayed but wasn’t reachable. Depressed, addicted, lost in her own pain. Maybe the relationship was just complicated, for reasons that take years to name.
And now she’s older. Maybe frailer. Maybe asking, for the first time in her adult life, for help.
The strategies that kept you safe at thirty don’t necessarily work at fifty-five. As mothers age, the filter goes. Wounds reopen. Old scripts come back in 4K.
Jo Lamble’s clinical advice on the podcast was to compartmentalise. Don’t pretend to drop the pain. “You can still carry that,” she said, “but you can still be the caring person you’d like to be.” Put it in a different box, with a key. Open it deliberately, somewhere safe. Lamble suggests the shower. Sarah Macdonald has a different version. She goes underwater in the pool and screams. (She recommends a private one. The council pool has noticed.)
Lamble has a particular dislike for the word boundaries. “What I hate is when people say, ‘I need to put some boundaries up.’ You actually announce the boundary setting. You don’t need to announce it.” She prefers limits. You don’t need to declare them to your mother. You just need to know them yourself. “I’ll drive you to your appointment. I’m not staying for tea.” Both halves of that sentence count.
3. The mum you’ve lost
You can lose a mother to more than death. Some of you have lost yours to dementia, a mother you can still ring who no longer knows the voice on the other end. Some have lost yours to estrangement, by your choice or hers. Mother’s Day doesn’t know the difference. The day arrives anyway, loud whether you want it to be or not. The Instagram tributes. The text chains you can’t quite bring yourself to mute.
We don’t really talk about stages of grief anymore. We talk about waves. Mother’s Day is a strong one. Sometimes it lands two days early. Sometimes Sunday is fine and Tuesday flattens you in the supermarket between the eggs and the bread. There is no order to grief. You don’t graduate from it. You learn to contain it, over time.
If you’re estranged from her, the day comes with extra noise. People will tell you to call her this Sunday because she’s getting older. You don’t have to. The work of staying out is its own work.
What might help. Carry her with you. Write her a Mother’s Day card, whatever shape your relationship has taken: what you miss, what you’re angry about, what you wish she could see. Cook her meal. Watch her film.
4. The mum you’ve quietly become
This is the mother nobody throws you a baby shower for.
You haven’t given birth in twenty years. But somewhere over the last three or five, you’ve become the mother to your own mother. You hold her medication list, her GP’s number, her spare keys, the schedule of who’s calling when. You know what’s in her fridge. You know when the electricity bill is due. You are the carer, even if nobody in your life uses the word.
This work has a price tag, and it has been pinned to midlife women. 65.8% of working carers reduce their hours. The average primary carer forgoes around $392,500 in lifetime earnings by retirement (Carers Australia, 2022). Australia is heading for a 400% increase in people over 85 by 2032. Most of the women carrying this load are reading this article right now, on a phone, between two other things.
What might help. Do one thing for yourself this Sunday that isn’t her. Call it fuel. You’ll need it on Monday. Ten minutes counts. So does a closed door. So does a long shower with the fan on, and nobody knocking.
Whichever Sunday you’re walking into
There are mothers that were. Mothers that weren’t. Mothers quietly disappearing into dementia. Mothers we never had. Mothers we became. Most of us are walking into Sunday with at least one of them, and often more than one.
Let the feeling, whatever it is, be yours.