First mother's day seperated.
It’s my first Mother’s Day separated since having my child, and honestly I’ve spent most of the day grieving. Not because I regret becoming a mother, my child is the best thing that ever happened to me after years of infertility and loss, but because I spent years shrinking myself trying to be loved by someone who kept making me feel like I was never enough. I kept believing that if I communicated better, changed more about myself, loved harder, or tried longer, things would finally get better. Instead, I lost pieces of myself trying to hold together a marriage where affection, kindness, emotional support, and even basic respect felt conditional.
I wanted a partner and a present parent for our child. Instead, I was criticized for being “too emotional,” “too talkative,” too friendly, too needy, too much. I stopped asking for affection because rejection hurt more than silence. I stayed after emotional affairs, after being compared to online women, after being told I would be left if my body changed or if I needed help after giving birth. Even marriage counseling ended because they quit trying. And somehow, even after asking for the divorce themselves, they still wanted control over me during the separation.
What hurts the most today is not just mourning the family I wanted my child to have, but realizing nobody has ever really celebrated me as a mother and nobody ever will. I grew up without an example of a healthy marriage, so I genuinely believed love and effort could fix things. But love cannot survive where communication is replaced with criticism, where vulnerability is punished, and where one person is constantly made to feel small. Today I’m grieving the version of me that kept trying to earn love from someone who now seems happier living the single, child free life they always wanted and will probably never see the effort I put into keeping us together before they tore the relationship apart, or the sacrifices I continue to make for our child.