Mother's day has always been difficult for me, because it asks us to overlook damage. To see our mothers & ourselves as mothers in a glowing, beautiful light. This year, many friends have said "this will be a hard Mother's Day for you, because it's your first without your mom." I love my friends for seeing and knowing this, and for being supportive. But if I am honest (but not raw, because raw is unbearable right now), this year is only hard in different ways. Mother's Day is about celebrating perfect mothers, and I didn't have a perfect mother. I was not a perfect mother. I wanted to be—I thought I would never damage my children, but despite my best intentions, I did. I know that my mom also had the best of intentions, and I don't really know that perfection is what motherhood asks of us anyway, despite this Hallmark holiday. But that is my truth: my mom couldn't always give me what I needed, I didn't give her what she needed, and it goes the other way, forward, into my children's generation. Logically I know that no one's mother is perfect & no one is a perfect mom. But it seems that other women are able to just see the good parts, the perfect parts, if only on this one day, and I can't. It's my fatal flaw: over thinking, over feeling. I know only this: we cannot bring perfection to motherhood. We can only bring ourselves. And while I didn't bring perfection, in the end all I can hope for, on this day and all the days of mothering, is grace & forgiveness.

This is what I wrote on my Instagram yesterday (I’m @amylsorensen there if you want to follow me). I received a whole bunch of comments about my post, and it also elicited a discussion with Kendell (who doesn’t really understand my use of social media) that devolved into tears as I thought about the ways I have hurt my children and the mistakes I have made.

I think I went into this Mother’s Day—the first one without a mother—thinking it wouldn’t be a big deal because I’ve always struggled with Mother’s Day anyway. That is part of why I wrote what I did, because I was trying to coax myself off the edge, to get myself to believe that it wasn’t a big deal and it wouldn’t hurt more than any other ones. But as I curled into a crumpled, weepy mess on my bed, I had to let myself admit that yes: this one was harder.

I want to set something straight, based on one of the comments on my post: I don’t think I failed as a mother. I think that failure would look like something different; failure would be giving up, would be not continuing to help them in whatever ways I can, would be not admiring or loving them. And that is not what I meant. I love them—so much. I could add one million “so”s to that sentence and it still wouldn’t say how much I love them. I am proud of them and the people they are becoming. I think they are amazing, each and every one of them, in their unique ways. They are all strong and have each overcome obstacles; they are each continuing to push forward and find their way. They make me laugh; I love talking to them, hearing their opinions and ideas.

I love them and it is because I love them that my disappointment in my mistakes hurts so much. But I didn’t fail as a mom. I just wasn’t as good of a mom as I wanted to be.

Motherhood, though, is tied tight between generations; it’s not only that I am a mom, but that I was a daughter. My mom’s influence on how I mothered my children is immense, which means each generation influences all the ones that come after, often in ways we can’t even see. Maybe the mistakes my mom’s mom made influenced mine, I mean. So the painful parts of my relationship with my mom seep into my relationship with my kids. The most painful part of yesterday was seeing other adult daughters with their mothers, saying kind things about them. Celebrating their relationship.

I was able to do this when my mom was still here, however imperfectly, because she was still here. I still thought there would be a way to fix, to repair, to move forward in an easier way. And now she is gone, that hope is also gone.

I loved my mom. She was an amazing woman who could do any craft she set her mind to. She was a sewer in every sense of the word; she made clothes and quilts and stuffed fabric rabbits. One season she sewed all of my gymnastics teammates’ sweats. She made excellent meals and I doubt she ever once served a dinner that didn’t include vegetables. She was a protofeminist who taught me many things about resisting the ways society tries to limit women. She sacrificed for me so I could be as involved with gymnastics as I was growing up. She took care of several of my friends in high school. She took me to the library and bought me books for Christmas and books from the book fair; she left me alone to sit on the back patio, reading away entire afternoons. She was beautiful and always dressed well. She was determined not to let expectations or her body’s limitations stop her—I will always remember her at 68, walking uphill in the desert outside of Cabo San Lucas with me, Haley, and Jake, from one zipline to the next, and the astounded look on the faces of the men helping us attach to the lines. Is this old woman really going to ride? their faces said, and she didn’t even answer their unspoken questions, just went.

I loved her.

But as I became an adult, got married, started my life, things got complicated. This was both of our faults, but I think I felt more guilt about it than she did. I married someone she didn’t get along with (partly because I married her; my husband and my mom are so much alike, and you know what happens when two fires try to interact? Someone gets burned, and it has always been me) and I worked within my marriage in different ways than she did in her marriage with my dad. I had a daughter and my mother loved her, but then I started having sons. She loved them, too, but she didn’t know how to interact with them. There was the tuna-noodle-casserole wedge. There was the fact that I didn’t feel like I could ask her to help me because I felt like I was imposing, especially with my kids. She wanted me to be one way and I wanted her to be another way and neither of us could do what the other one needed.

As time went on there were more wedges. I think my mom had unwavering faith in me that I could do anything in my life—that I was, in fact, meant to do something amazing. Isn’t that strange: her belief in my intelligence and abilities became a wedge because of the dissonance between her faith in me and the reality of my life. I was supposed to change the world but all I really did was what most everyone does, got married, had a family. I graduated from college but “only in English.”

But maybe what was most damaging to our relationship was the differences in our communication habits. My mom is the type of person who assumes that everyone wants to talk to her, to include her, to be involved with her. I’m the type of person who assumes no one wants that from me. So she needed me to be assertive when I didn’t know how, and I needed her to be inclusive in ways that were foreign to her. Neither of these traits is wrong or bad; there isn’t a moral judgement here, but just an acknowledgement.

My sister summed this up for me very neatly in the days after my mom’s funeral. “When it comes right down to it, Amy,” she said, “Mom just didn’t understand you.” The tone of voice in that kind of statement is essential, and hers was patient and loving. That sentence helped me to start letting go of my guilt, because it’s not that I am defective, but just baffling. And that is OK.

So here it is: the first Mother’s Day without my mom. And despite my bravado (which I only shared with my own psyche), it was painful. Much more painful than any other Mother’s Day. It was painful because she wasn’t here, of course. But it was painful because it was a reminder that even if she was here, it wouldn’t have been what other people seem to have. (I’m fully aware of how social media only presents us in one light, and usually it’s positive, which is another reason I wrote that post on Instagram, because I refuse to put myself in a false “Amazing Amy” light.) And since she is gone, that will never happen.

I didn’t get to have an uncomplicated, healthy relationship with my mother, and now I never will.

Which is why I wrote that last sentence of my Instagram post: forgiveness, grace. Forgiving not just my mom but myself (although I can’t imagine what either of those would look like). And letting grace work forward, so that while yes, I wasn’t a perfect mom, I was a mom who tried her best but made many mistakes—while that is true, it isn’t the only story. What I have is whatever future I have left with my smart, funny, caring, unique children and my relationship with them. And what I want to accomplish is that, when they eventually have their first Mother’s Day without their mother, they won’t have this snarl of emotions. They will know (I hope, I hope that is what I can give them) that I love them and that I am proud of them and that they didn’t disappoint me, not once, not ever.