I don’t specifically remember my first Mother’s Day as a mother, over 16 years ago. But I know it must have been so sweet. My husband probably served me breakfast in bed. My five-month-old son William likely had his breakfast there with me too, nursing himself back to sleep. We probably took a walk in the neighborhood, or maybe we drove over the Bay Bridge from Oakland into San Francisco and walked the Embarcadero, enjoying the spring sunshine of the Bay Area.
Being a new mom had so much promise and hope, and I’m sure I relished the fact that my husband Nick and I had finally become a family, not just a couple.
As my family grew, Mother’s Day became a chance for ‘me time’
My son Kai was born in 2012, expanding our family and making us parents for the second time. With that came more responsibility, more mothering. Mother’s Day soon became a day to escape. A day to leave my husband in charge of all the parenting, all the decisions, all the care our tiny children needed.
As the default stay-at-home parent, all I wanted on Mother’s Day in that season was time alone, away from my beautiful but always needy kids. It was a day where I could get my nails done, exercise without kids at my feet. A day to pretend, just for a few hours, like I didn’t have any kids at all.
After my son died, everything I understood about motherhood changed
And then William died in a tragic ski accident in 2019, and everything I understood about motherhood changed. All the care, all the love, all the time I had poured into my child wasn’t enough to keep him alive. I spent so much time feeling ashamed and embarrassed that my child had died on my watch. I felt like I had failed as a mother.
So that first year, the first Mother’s Day after William died, I pretended it didn’t exist. I was not capable of celebrating, of acknowledging this hallmark day that felt like a slap in the face to a newly bereaved mother.
Courtesy of Susie Shaw
I found a way to keep parenting my son after he died
And then about six months into my grief, we decided to try again. To have another child, to parent again. Once that happened, I started to learn how to parent William again, too. That I had to, and wanted to, still actively parent him, just in a different way.
He was no longer there to tuck in at night or help with his homework. But I could talk about him to others, share his story, create a legacy for him by doing service in his name. And teach his new little brother all about him.
I found a pathway through the darkness to bring William’s light back into our world by choosing to become a mother again, and to continue to mother him.
Courtesy of Susie Shaw
Now I spend Mother’s Day at the cemetery
These days, I choose to spend Mother’s Day at the cemetery. It’s the place where I feel most complete as a family. My husband and I bring our living children there, and we sit and visit with our dead son.
This was never part of the plan, that dream of having a beautiful family all wrapped up in a perfect bow. But it’s my life, and I’ve developed ways to cope with the realities of being a bereaved mom, especially on Mother’s Day. It’s important to me to be at the cemetery on that day, to hold all the joy and the pain together at once. To show my living kids that we can show up, even when it’s hard and not what most people do.
We’ve turned the cemetery into a place of joy and connection
I don’t want our pilgrimage to the cemetery to feel like a burden for my living children. So we make an event out of it. We pack a picnic brunch — coffee, croissants, fruit. We bring a blanket. We bring frisbees, balls, anything to keep the kids active and moving. My teenager climbs the old maple tree directly in front of William’s gravesite and swings down from its thick branches. The little one, Bodhi, watches from below. He’ll do that someday, too.
We have two dogs now, too, so they also come along for the outing. We always walk around the whole cemetery, commenting on all the new graves, all the old graves, wondering who they are and what stories lay beneath. The young ones, babies not even a year old. The graves simply marked ‘Father,’ or ‘Mother.’ There are so many stories just like ours.
And we connect with the dead, our dead son, William, the one who made me a mother. And we love the living family that we are today. I have learned that we can, and must, do both.
