Episode 88 – Mother’s Day: I Made the Lunches, Booked the Table, and Still Felt Invisible

Jane McFadden:

Hello and welcome to ADHD Mums. Today we have our Mother’s Day episode and it is called I made the lunches, booked the table and I still felt invisible. If Mother’s Day makes you feel ragey, flat or invisible you are not ungrateful but you may be unsupported.

Mother’s Day is supposed to feel like a celebration but sometimes it can feel more like a job, more load, more things to do. It’s just one more reminder that even on the day that is dedicated to the mums the system really doesn’t show up for us. I was never planning on doing this episode and I actually thought it may just be me. Maybe I’m the one who just feels this weird heartache on Mother’s Day, the invisible kind, the uncelebrated kind and I really braced myself to be wrong, to be flooded with stories of women who feel completely different, who feel grateful, who feel acknowledged, seen and loved on Mother’s Day and I was actually floored at the fact that not one woman wrote back with any of those stories.

So what did I get instead? I got hundreds of women saying very similar things. I’m usually not acknowledged. My partner doesn’t get me a card, a coffee, anything. Sometimes my partner posts about his own mum, doesn’t even mention me. I bought the gift, I made myself a cake and I set the table and no one even offered to help. I’m a solo parent, my child forgot and I didn’t remind them because that made me feel even worse.

I saw my own mum, I bought her flowers and I made lunch for her, then I did the dishes. Everyone else had the day off except for me. I did my usual Sunday which was washing, ironing, cleaning and getting ready for the school week. Now these women aren’t ungrateful, they’re not supported, they’re bone tired, they show up anyway and it feels like the response that I was receiving was a lot around hoping that someone, anyone, will notice me. And when no one does, it hurts in a way that you can’t explain and that is what the system of motherhood often misses, the emotional labour that we carry that should be acknowledged, not with grand gestures but with real recognition. And this doesn’t cost money. But when that still doesn’t come, it’s not your fault, it’s a culture problem. So let’s name it.

Mother’s Day can also be a performance. It’s like Easter, Christmas, Tooth Fairy and behind in the background of these days are the unsung heroes which are the mums. Except on Mother’s Day it’s supposed to be about appreciating and thanking you but yet we still a lot of the time end up doing a lot of the invisible labour or visible labour at times as well.

I found from the survey on Facebook and Instagram that a lot of women said that they are still buying the cards for the mother-in-laws, for their own mum, for themselves and they may be the ones reminding their partner if they have one, book the table or booking it themselves and ensuring that the kids know what’s actually happening. They may also be the ones that are holding space for everyone else’s feelings while theirs are just shoved to the side. And for solo mums, there’s often absolutely nothing. No thank you, no moment of recognition, it’s a regular Sunday.

You may have an ex-partner that doesn’t remember you. You may send the kids with a gift for their Mother’s Day if they’re female or Father’s Day if they’re male. You may find that you think through that for them to model for the children but yet you may be the one that doesn’t receive that back. Maybe your ex-partner doesn’t remember you at all and you’re worrying about the example that is set for your children around acknowledging women. Maybe you have a blended family, it’s complicated.

Once we add in all of that plus neurodivergence, yours or your child, the whole thing can become a massive sensory-emotional sandwich with a huge amount of unmet needs and unmet expectations across the board. You may have a really complex relationship with Mother’s Day that goes beyond logistics. For example, you may have grief for the mum that you lost. Grief for the version of the mum that you wanted to have but you didn’t. Or maybe the version of being a mother yourself that you thought you’d be but it hasn’t ended up that way.

Maybe there’s loneliness, especially if you’re raising neurodivergent kids and you may feel like no one gets it. Or maybe you’ve got a partner who says just calm down and maybe they think that’s helpful advice. Maybe you’re not in a relationship and you wish you were. Maybe you’re estranged from your family. There’s so many layers of complexity to Mother’s Day.

There may even just be heavy guilt. The fact that you may just want to opt out of Mother’s Day but you can’t. Maybe the feeling of dread of the handmade gifts because they come with mess, crying, meltdowns. There is nothing in my family more emotionally charged than a birthday or any type of celebrations. Who gets to hand what? It always ends up with a huge fight every single time. And for some of us this doesn’t feel joyful and you may be thinking this is a failure on my part. I’m dreading it. But you think you should feel differently.

And maybe you look at social media and there’s photos online that don’t look like anything like your day. Maybe your reality is that everything that you want to do you actually can’t. Even small things like going out for lunch so you don’t have to cook lunch on a weekend and make lunch three, four different lunches for everybody. Maybe you have children that for all sorts of reasons are unable to eat in restaurants or in parks and you end up having to pack the food or come home and cook anyway. Maybe there’s just a few things that you’d love to do but they’re not in the realms of possibility.

You know, last Mother’s Day I cried in the pantry. I couldn’t even explain it at the time but I felt this weight sitting on my chest. And when my hubby said to me what do you want to do I honestly didn’t even know how to answer without planning something that worked for everybody else. I didn’t want to manage the logistics, make it easy for everybody, navigate the food sensitivities, juggling the expectations. I didn’t want to be the one coordinating the day trying to figure out how to make it work for everybody so there was the bare minimum of crying.

And I remember realising the night before that one child didn’t have a wrapped gift. Another was homeschooled, she didn’t even have a card. But then one child had been to the Mother’s Day store with $20 and bought five presents. And I realised that it was going to be a mess in the morning. And I said to my hubby I think they’re going to fight, this is going to be chaos, we’ve really got to put together with who’s giving what. And he said oh it’ll be fine but it wasn’t. It wasn’t fine and I felt more invisible than ever because then the next morning I wondered why it ended up being so chaotic. And I thought maybe I should have just gotten up and just sorted it out myself.

Mother’s Day can be completely emotionally charged for all sorts of reasons. How about we move to what we can do about it? How could we make a change here? Maybe we look at setting expectations. And you say I don’t want to do lunch. I’d like the morning to myself. Or I’ll have the morning at home but then I’d actually like to do this in the afternoon. Maybe you say I’d like to sleep in till at least eight o’clock in the morning or whatever is a sleep in for you. I’d like to do presents then. Be the bodyguard of that door and do not let anybody in.

Maybe you say at 10 o’clock in the morning I’m going to go and have a coffee by myself. I don’t need a present because I’m going to book myself a massage or I’m going to go for a walk. Some of us look for someone else’s permission, someone else’s approval. Maybe we should just take it. If you’re single, think about what you actually would like and maybe we need to find a way to take it. If your children are little, maybe we need to model something powerful that motherhood doesn’t mean being a martyr.

Maybe you’re allowed to say this is the movie that you’re watching, this is the snack, this is my quiet time. If you’re a solo mum, that might be it. That might be your part for the day. That’s not selfish, that may be survival. Maybe you give them an iPad so you can read a book. What is it that you really want to do and maybe we should just start taking it instead of waiting to see what other people will do and feeling let down.

But if you are in a relationship and you feel like you’re going to end up managing the whole day yourself, you’re bracing yourself for it and you know you’re going to feel really, really down about it and that’s been your past experience. Maybe you need to make a change. Now if you wanted to make a change, I’ve set out a few points just to give you a bit of a structure. So one, you’d want to set the tone early. You’d want to have the conversation a few days before Mother’s Day. Don’t wait to the morning of when the emotions are raw.

You may try saying something like, hey I just wanted to talk about Sunday, which is Mother’s Day. This is what I’d really love. You may like to be specific. If you know that if you say that you don’t want anything for Mother’s Day, you will just hope that someone will think of you and give you something, you may not be in a relationship where you have that beautiful romantic surprise. That may not be your reality. People cannot meet your needs if you don’t know what they are. And yes it sucks that you have to, but you may be more likely to get what you actually would like if you name it.

You may like to try saying, this is what I’d love, a morning where I’m not in charge, I don’t want to plan meals, I don’t want to manage the kids, I don’t want to get them in the car, I want something quiet and I want something for me. This is what I’d love. You may try saying something like, at 11am I’m going for a walk and I’m getting a coffee alone. I’m just letting you know so you can plan around it.

If you’re co-parenting or you’re a solo mum, you might get to define what Mother’s Day actually means for you. You don’t owe anyone tradition. You can give yourself permission to start that now. You may say, we have takeaway on Mother’s Day and I’m saying no to visits. I’m watching a funny movie that makes me laugh and this is what I’m doing.

Depending on the age of your children and how it all works, but you may look at what you actually like to do. Instead of making a lunch or doing dinner with family, you may just order takeaway food, sit in your pyjamas and watch movies with your kids or without.

The next point I really wanted to talk about was validating your own experience. You may find that no one else acknowledges you, but don’t let that rewrite who you are and what your worth is. Remind yourself, I am not invisible. I’m holding a whole family together and I matter, even when no one says it out loud.

I’ve also spoken to so many women who’ve said things like, I don’t know how I did it but, and they’ve told me about sleepless nights, surgeries, heartbreak, burnout, but they still drop the kid at school, they pack the lunch, they showed up to the teacher’s meeting, they smiled at the teacher. We can’t always show it but we’re here every single day and that quiet consistency is power. Mums are a force to be reckoned with, not because it’s easy but because we do it anyway.

If no one else is going to say that they appreciate you, they see you this week, then let’s say to each other and show each other that we care. So I’ll start it off. I see you, you’re doing the impossible. The emails and the DMs that I see from what ADHD mums are facing in this climate at the moment, with zero applause, is huge. You are not invisible, even if no one shows up with a card.

You matter, not because it’s Mother’s Day, just because you show up every day. If your child has a massive meltdown, your partner forgets or you spend the day crying in your car, that doesn’t cancel your worth but it proves how hard you’re trying to hold it all together. If no one notices how hard you’re trying, you are still changing your child’s life and you as a mother, it doesn’t need to be validated by a calendar event.

We know the impact that we are having on our children’s nervous system, the way that they feel safe when they fall apart, the way that you show up even when no one else does. If Mother’s Day feels like just another day, know that the stuff that you’re doing, even if it feels invisible, it matters more than you think.

I remind myself of my why, when the school calls again and I have to drop everything, when I get woken up every single morning before the sun’s up, when I’ve explained the same thing seven different ways and it still ends up with at least two children crying. It’s not the short-term wins that I’m really here for, it’s the long game. The why is the kids, their safety, their confidence, their ability to feel loved and understood in a world that often doesn’t. So when I’m running on fumes, I feel unappreciated and I wonder if it matters. I just come back to that, this is for them.

Even if they can’t see it now, I know that they will. Because we love them. And it’s not always the warm, fuzzy, cuddly love. Sometimes it’s the gritty, stubborn, survival mode kind of love. Sometimes it’s rage love that gets me up in the morning. Because I’m just angry and tired of being woken up again and I just want to have a cup of tea in peace.

But this love keeps us going long after we’ve hit capacity. Sometimes I feel burnt out, overrun and it feels unfair. The constant interruptions, the mayhem, the mental load, it’s all on me all the time. But in that spiral, the only thing that’s helped me was to come back to my why. I’m not doing this because it’s balanced and fair. I’m not doing it because it’s easy.

I’m only doing it because these are my children and no one will fight for them the way that I do. It doesn’t make the load lighter, it doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it meaningful. So if you’ve sat there and you’re thinking to yourself, what’s the point? No one sees me, no one thanks me, no one gets it.

And that, if I had to say, would be one of the most common threads in the Facebook and the Instagram responses. You may feel like Mother’s Day is so brutal when you’re holding it all and you’ve got very little in return. But remind yourself we talk about our parents as adults. We remember how safe we felt or we didn’t. We remember who came through, who made space, who kept showing up, even when they were tired.

Your kids will remember. And even if on Mother’s Day it feels like they don’t see it, are they too small to understand or are they teenagers and can’t see anything outside themselves? But we’re not doing this for fairness. We’re doing this for love. You’re doing this because you want your kids to have what you didn’t have or what you’re still learning to give yourself.

And that is the long game and that’s what motherhood is. And that is enough. So this Mother’s Day, let’s do something for ourselves that’s just for us, that makes you feel like yourself, not just somebody’s mum.

Here are some takeaways for Mother’s Day, particularly for the mums who feel emotionally overloaded, under-supported or deeply unacknowledged. There are seven takeaways.

One, you’re allowed to feel disappointed. If it feels like an anti-climax, emotionally heavy or straight-up crap, it’s not because you’re ungrateful. It may be because this day is not actually going to meet the emotional labour that you’ve been doing all year.

Two, you don’t have to be the cruise director of your own celebration. You don’t have to plan your day if you don’t want to. You don’t have to manage other people’s feelings or pretend it’s enough. If it feels like another logistical job, it actually may be that. You can either, as I talked about earlier, plan it out even though that’s unfair, you shouldn’t have to do it or not, but it’s completely up to you. But you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You can opt out, sit on the couch and watch movies with your kids. It’s totally up to you. You don’t have to post an image of you out for breakfast with your kids all looking happy.

Number three, protect your energy, not just your time. If you want to say no to the mother-in-law, if you want to say no to your sister who’s just had a baby, if you want to opt out, you can opt out. You can ask for space. If that’s what you desperately want, this is your permission slip, ask for space.

Four, grief and joy can coexist. You may be grieving a mother, a child, or the dream of how you thought motherhood would feel. You may deeply love your kids, but you might have very complex feelings come up. That’s okay. There are so many women who feel like that.

Five, you do not need public proof of your motherhood. Just because no one posted about you or handed you a card doesn’t mean that you are not doing the most important unseen work of all. You already know what you’re doing. You know how hard you’re working. We are doing it for our kids and you may not be acknowledged and it sucks. But this is why we may need to work on acknowledging each other. And it’s not okay.

Number six, your kids might not see you now, but they will. You’re building memories, you’re shaping the nervous system and they will remember. It may feel like they won’t, but they will.

Number seven, you are not alone. There are so many women who feel flat, forgotten, angry. Now, if this landed for you, send it to your group chat, send it to your friends, send it to your partner, jump into the Facebook group and share what would a real Mother’s Day look like for you. Because I see you. Every single bit of your effort matters.

Thank you for everybody who wrote in on Facebook and Instagram. Please join the Facebook group, share the episode, like this podcast, give me a review. And I hope that your Mother’s Day goes as well as it possibly can. And I hope that this episode helped you. Thank you so much for listening.