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I know, right!

How selfish is she to take a solo trip without her family for Mother’s Day. Isn’t Mother’s Day all about being with family and celebrating the fact that you are a mother, or is it?

This year, for Mother’s Day, I booked two nights away camping in the middle of a forest with nothing to do but be me and I don’t feel guilty about it. It feels liberating.

You see, becoming a mother took 11 years of infertility and grief, and now, as a mother, some days I just want to run away. And it’s not that I don’t love my life; it’s because my nervous system is about to crash. It’s my flight-or-fight responses when motherhood becomes too much, and that doesn’t make me a bad mother—just a human.

My nervous system can’t take the endless cries, the mental load of planning breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and then having to make them, making sure my son isn’t an asshole and trying to co-regulate his emotions while at the same time trying to keep calm after being triggered because my childhood was so screwed up. It’s a lot to ask one human to do.

Yes, I am thankful every day that I have a healthy son after my twin pregnancy was terminated for medical reasons at 22 weeks and the stillbirth of my daughter, Loey, but I didn’t expect the constant pull on my nervous system—and a nervous system that has been knocked too many times. When I became a mother of a living child, I realized that I didn’t like motherhood. I loved being a mother and the relationship I had with my son, but not this motherhood bullsh*t that society pushes onto you.

Listen, I tried to join the team but only felt sad, depressed, and overwhelmed. I started to compare myself to other women and tried to keep up while at the same time losing myself in it to only realise that it was all a lie and an illusion, which I finally understood when my own mother took her own breath after two years of battling brain cancer. I know—hard lesson to learn.

Let’s talk about how Mother’s Day is an illusion self-made by society. Okay, let’s be frank and to the point: Patriarchy. It creates a consumer-like energy but really has nothing to do with her needs and her identity. You see, Mother’s Day is every day, and that’s it. Mother’s Day by creating awareness of its history.

Mother’s Day originated in the United States in the early 20th century. Anna Jarvis is credited with founding it in 1908 when she held a memorial for her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, in Grafton, West Virginia. Her mother had organized “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to promote child and maternal health. Anna campaigned to make it a national holiday, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. However, Jarvis later denounced the commercialization of the holiday and spent her later years campaigning against it. Today, it is celebrated worldwide to honor mothers and maternal figures.

Mother’s Day, initially rooted in honoring mothers and promoting maternal health through the legacy of Ann Reeves Jarvis and her daughter Anna Jarvis, was quickly overtaken by patriarchal ideas and commercialization. Although Anna Jarvis envisioned the holiday as a sincere celebration of motherhood’s emotional labor and maternal bonds, businesses exploited it to reinforce traditional gender roles. Commercial interests emphasized gifts, flowers, and cards as expressions of gratitude, reducing mothers to consumer targets rather than recognizing their complex contributions to family and society. The patriarchal notion of motherhood was further entrenched by portraying it as an obligation of self-sacrifice and domesticity, overshadowing Anna Jarvis’s original vision of appreciating mothers’ diverse roles. Disillusioned by this shift, Jarvis spent her later years condemning the commercialization of Mother’s Day, calling for a return to its authentic spirit.

It is not selfish to take a solo trip for Mother’s Day or any day because we, too, need a break from the constant demands placed on us. We, too, need to reconnect with ourselves in a way that can only be done in solitude. We need to celebrate ourselves as a whole, and that only happens when we have space—uninterrupted space. In this space, we get to see ourselves again, to dance with our spirit, and to become the mother and human we know we are without society’s pulls to be something we’re not.

So, in this solo trip, I feel no guilt or selfishness because I get to spend time with my soul and spirit in the silence and beauty of me. This is not selfish. This is life.

You are allowed to create a life that is true to you, regardless of what the institution of motherhood says you need to be or do so that others approve. You are the only one that matters here because when you matter, all matters.

Take that trip and feel into your soul the quietness of the world and the silence of your thoughts—uninterrupted by a man, by a child, just in flow with nature, Mother Nature. Let Mother Nature hold you because, girl, no one else will.

To you and saying no to the traditional Mother’s Day baloney.

With love,
Jenn

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