Triggered

Photo by Dev Asangbam on Unsplash

Mother’s Day was a few days ago, and I received a bunch of texts in a group thread that wished a “Happy Mother’s Day” to “all the beautiful ladies” in the text group. I had a thousand issues with it, including “the beautiful ladies” bit. The primary issue was that everyone in the thread knows better. How? They’re all psychosocial team members - social workers and chaplains - of a hospice. They work with people every day who are about to lose - or just lost- a loved one. More often than not, that person is their parent. They know that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be incredibly painful to the people in their care and some of their co-workers. They know better.

Last week, well over 90% of the bereavement calls I made had a clear theme: Mother’s Day. Countless men and women lamented losing their mother right before Mother’s Day. Not all of the calls I made were to newly bereaved people. For some of the people I was calling, it had been anywhere from a month to a year since their loss, but it was still likely their first Mother’s Day without their mom. I guided all of them - regardless of how long ago their loss was - in storytelling about Mother’s Days of the past and held space for them to reflect on how they can honor their mother this year despite it being their first Mother’s Day without them. Similar conversations will happen in June about Father’s Day.

These two holidays that celebrate our parents can be very difficult for people whose parents died. It can also be a painful for anyone who has a complicated relationship with their mother or father. Seeing friends celebrate their mother when your own mother abandoned you can hurt deeply. If you had to make the difficult decision to distance yourself from your father, Father’s Day can be a harsh reminder of that reality. I pointed it out to a person in the text group that the day can be hard for some, and the response was only slightly less tone deaf than the text thread itself. Essentially, they apologized that it “triggered” me. There was no empathy in the statement. That non-apology was a reminder of why we must do better for others.

There is another reason why days like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be hard to handle. Many adults have dreams to become parents, and they may not be. Many suffer silently with miscarriages, fertility, lack of opportunity, and other difficult obstacles to becoming parents. When people wish you a “Happy Mother’s Day” without caring if you have a mother or a child, it is painful. We need to stop saying that greeting to all adults as if they have access to their parents and are a parent themselves. Listen first. Learn someone’s story.

We may think that a simple, “Happy Father’s Day” to a random guy at church or a “Happy Mother’s Day” to a woman checking out at the grocery store is kind. But we may be causing unnecessary pain. It is not as if parent loss, child loss, infertility, and loss of dreams are foreign ideas. Everyone experiences one or more of those. That makes the idea of wishing a happy day to everyone over a certain age rude and tone deaf. Perhaps it’s laziness, too. It’s easier to wish it to everyone and not care if it causes pain and then take a moment and assess if it’s appropriate.

I wasn’t triggered on Mother’s Day. I know what the day holds and avoid public places. I surround myself with animals and a select few people. I was astonished that people who are trained to provide emotional support to people who are in anticipatory grief or grieving were part of the haphazard well-wishing crowd. Perhaps that’s what was triggering.

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How do Mother’s Day and Father’s Day feel for you if you lost a child or a parent, or are waiting to become a parent ?