BONUS EPISODE: Mother's Day In The After

Mother’s Day after the death of a spouse is not a simple day.

It is layered.
It is emotional.
It is often holding multiple truths at once.

In this bonus episode, we talk about what it actually means to move through Mother’s Day as a widow and a mother — where love and grief are not separate experiences, but happening side by side.

We explore:

•  The emotional complexity of Mother’s Day after loss 
•  Why this day can feel both tender and heavy at the same time 
•  The missing presence of the person who once witnessed and celebrated your motherhood 
•  How grief reshapes identity and capacity in motherhood 
•  The lived reality of becoming both mother and father after loss 
•  The exhaustion of holding emotional, mental, and logistical responsibility alone 
•  The desire to retreat from a day that feels overwhelming 
•  What it can feel like to show up for your children while in survival
•  The guilt and fear that can surface around “not being enough” as a mother in grief 
•  Why attachment, repair, and presence matter more than perfection 
•  Permission to let Mother’s Day be what it actually is this year, without forcing it into something it’s not 

This episode is not about doing Mother’s Day “right.”

It’s about naming what it actually feels like when you are mothering inside profound loss, and offering space for all of it to exist without judgment.

If this resonates, you can share it with someone who may need it, or leave a review to help this work reach more grieving widowed mothers who are walking through something similar.

Thank you for being here.

Love,

Lauren

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Widows Collective, where grief meets hope, healing, and community. I'm Lauren Lentz, grief coach, fellow widow, and the heart behind this space. There is life before loss, and then there is life after. If you're here, it likely means your life has been turned upside down by the death of your person. Maybe you've just found yourself in this new world that feels unrecognizable, or maybe you've been walking it for a while, trying to figure out what healing looks like now. I want you to know you are not alone. This podcast is a gathering place for widows living in the after. Together, we'll name the eight, honor the love, and share tools, truths, and stories that help you feel supported along the way. My hope is that every episode gives you a sense of community, comfort, and permission to meet yourself exactly where you are. And before we go any further into what I want to speak to, I want to acknowledge that this day holds so much for us. It can be a day that often emphasizes the duality of life as a widow, a day that represents both joy and ache, presence and absence, connection and exhaustion. And sometimes all of those things can exist within the same hour or the same moment. So if you're listening to this while bracing for the day, or while trying to get through it, while trying to create something meaningful for your children and also simultaneously feeling the weight of what and who is missing, or while wanting to push the fast forward button on the day altogether, I just want to say, I get that, and you are not alone here because Mother's Day after the death of a spouse is layered in ways people outside of this experience often don't fully understand. It's not just about motherhood, although that has its own layers and complexities too. It's about motherhood inside of grief. And that changes so much about what this day symbolizes. As I was writing this episode, I came across something about the origins of Mother's Day that stopped me for a second because the irony of it was not lost on me. I don't know about you, but I didn't realize that Mother's Day was originally rooted in grief. The modern version of Mother's Day was created by a woman named Anna Jarvis after the death of her own mother. It began not as this commercialized celebration we often see now, but as a memorial, a way of honoring love, sacrifice, absence, and motherhood itself. And I think there's something really meaningful in that because for many widowed mothers, Mother's Day doesn't feel purely celebratory. It feels tender, heavy, joyful and painful at the same time. Which means if this day feels emotional for you, if it feels complicated, if part of you wants to celebrate while another part of you wants to disappear from it entirely, you may actually be closer to the original heart of this day than you realize. One of the hardest parts of Mother's Day can simply be the absence of the person who used to celebrate you inside of it. The person who witnessed your motherhood in real time, who saw all of the invisible parts, the exhaustion, the mental load, the effort it took to hold everything together, the love woven into all the small things no one else in the outside world noticed. The person who maybe helped the kids with the cards, who reminded them to say Happy Mother's Day, who bought the flowers, who texted you first thing in the morning, who looked at you and said, You're such a good mom. And now there can be this ache where that used to be. And sometimes what hurts most isn't even in the grand gesture that's missing. It's the loss of being witnessed, the loss of the person who understood what this day held because they were building that life alongside you. For so many widows, Mother's Day can feel really disorienting because the day still exists, but the person who helped give shape and meaning to it does not. And while the outside world may be celebrating, you may be trying to navigate the ache of who is no longer here to celebrate you at all. And that grief is real, the absence is real, and both deserve our acknowledgement. There's also this quieter realization that shows up on Mother's Day. It's one I hear from widows all the time. The version of you that mothered before loss and the version of you mothering now almost feel like two completely different people living inside the same life. And the reason that this can happen is because grief changes capacity. Your nervous system is disrupted. Your emotional bandwidth shrinks. Your ability to rest feels like somewhere out of reach. Your access to patience and steadiness, regulation, and even joy are all impacted. And yet, life keeps asking things from you. Your children still need you. The routines still exist, the meals, the decisions, the emotional presence, the responsibilities that don't pause because your world was shattered. And there is this kind of exhaustion that can come from trying to mother while carrying grief at the same time. So much energy is already being used, just trying to survive. So what starts to be magnified around Mother's Day is grief for the mother you used to be, the version of you that had more space, more calm, more ease. The version of you who wasn't carrying this level of fear, loss, overwhelm, or survival inside her body every single day. And that can feel incredibly tender to recognize. And it's because so many other secondary losses are happening all at once. This day represents those as well. And so we can feel just a way that's often indescribable. There is yet another reality that many people don't fully think about, but widows feel every single day. You are now carrying both roles. You have become both mother and father, not symbolically, quite literally. And that changes the entire weight of your life. You are now holding all of the emotional support, the structure, the protection, the consistency, the decision-making, the discipline, nurturing, planning, the financial stress, the invisible mental load, all of it. And even if you have support around you, there is often still this underlying awareness that so much of the emotional and logistical weight continues to fall on you. And that can feel incredibly lonely and sometimes all-consuming because help is not the same thing as shared responsibility. It's not the same thing as having your person beside you inside the daily carrying of your life. Sometimes widows describe it as never fully exhaling anymore. Like part of their body remains braced, always scanning, always holding, always anticipating what needs to happen next. There's no one else fully standing inside the role beside you in the same way anymore. And over time, that level of ongoing responsibility can just be exhausting on every level, physically, emotionally, mentally, financially, relationally. You're constantly shifting between nurturing and protecting softness and survival, holding everyone else together while you're trying to carry your own grief too. And that is a tremendous amount for one nervous system and one person to hold. So when you think about all that I've shared, it makes sense that sometimes you don't want to do Mother's Day at all. Sometimes you want to crawl under the covers and let the entire day pass. And I don't even need to say it, but it's not because you don't love your children or that you aren't grateful to be their mother. It's because grief feels too close to the surface. The contrast between what was and what is feels unbearable. Being celebrated while simultaneously carrying this much pain can feel extremely disorienting. And sometimes we can have guilt around it. And sometimes the body simply wants protection from it all, from the expectations, social media, the reminders, the pretending, the pressure to make meaning out of a day that feels incredibly painful. And I really want all of my widow sisters to hear this part clearly. Wanting to go inward, wanting to retreat does not make you a bad mother. Sometimes it simply means your nervous system is asking for less input while carrying something really heavy and overstimulating. And at the same time, you know, many of you will still get up and do the day anyway. You'll make the breakfast, open the cards, smile for the photos, go to brunch, hold the traditions together while carrying the awareness that there is a missing seat at the table. And that duality can feel impossible to explain unless you've lived it. Because externally, you may look present, functional, even joyful in moments, but internally there may be grief moving in the undercurrent of your body. And sometimes widows judge themselves harshly for that, for not feeling fully connected or feeling emotionally split, for smiling and aching at the same time. But that is the reality of grief. Two things can exist together. You can love your children deeply and still feel devastated. You can create beautiful moments and still wish your person were there to witness them. You can feel grateful and grieving. None of these realities cancel each other out. There's also this guilt that can creep in through all of this. The fear that your grief is impacting your children. The fear that you are not enough now. The fear that because you are struggling, your children will somehow carry damage from your humanity. And I want to say something that I think widowed mothers desperately need to hear. Your grief is not what harms your children. What matters most is not perfection, it's connection, it's safety, it's repair when harm is made, presence over time, love that remains accessible even in changed capacity. Your children do not need the version of you that existed before loss ruptured everything. They need you. The version of you that is here now, the version learning how to carry grief and motherhood at the same time, the version that keeps returning, keeps trying, keeps showing up inside circumstances that are unimaginably hard. And that matters far more than pretending you are untouched by what happened. So maybe this Mother's Day, the goal isn't to force yourself to feel okay or to recreate what this day used to feel like before your life changed. Maybe it's allowing the day to be whatever it honestly is for you this year. Maybe that looks like lowering the pressure around it, keeping things simpler, letting some things go, asking for help instead of trying to carry the whole day by yourself. Maybe it looks like letting yourself feel the emotional weight of it all without trying to immediately pull yourself out of it, or stepping away from a moment when the ache rises. Maybe it looks like saying yes to what matters and no to what feels too heavy, or recognizing that you do not have to perform joy in order to love your children well. Instead of trying to create a perfect day, may you focus on creating real moments, connected moments, meaningful moments inside of a day that already holds so much. Because this day can hold love and grief at the same time, presence and absence, joy for your children, and heartbreak for yourself. And allowing both does not diminish either one. So if this day feels tender or heavy, complicated, lonely, beautiful, and painful all at once, know that what you are feeling is normal, natural, and absolutely part of this experience. You are mothering inside of profound loss, and that requires more of you than most people will ever fully understand. So if all you do today is love your children in the capacity you currently have, that's enough. If all you do is make it through the day, that is enough. If all you do is breathe and regulate and keep showing up inside of a life you never planned for, that is enough too. If you are in a place where this is the first year you feel like you can breathe again and honor both the wonder and the grief, that is too. There is no way to hold this day perfectly. You just have to move through it in a way that you can. And I hope somewhere inside of all this, you are able to offer yourself even the smallest amount of the compassion you so freely offer everyone else and you so absolutely deserve. And if no one has said it to you yet today, you are doing an incredibly hard thing. You are a wonderful mother, no matter what. And you are still loving your children through it. That matters far more than you know. Until next time, big hugs and lots of love. You've been listening to the Widows Collective. I'm Lauren Lentz, and it means so much to me that you spent this time here today. If you found comfort or connection in today's episode, I invite you to please subscribe, leave a rating, or share it with someone who might need a little support. You can also follow me on Instagram at I'm Sorry We're Friends, and join my email list at LaurenLentz.com to explore my one-to-one grief coaching, group program, retreats, and other tools designed to help widows navigate loss with understanding and guidance. I hope you'll join me next week for another conversation where we'll continue exploring grief, healing, and ways to reimagine life after loss. I'm sorry you're here, and I'm so grateful that you are. Thank you for being a part of this community. Your presence is an act of courage and self compassion, and I'm honored to walk this path alongside you.