Mother’s Day felt especially emotional this year, carrying both gratitude and sadness quietly side by side.
Earlier in the evening, we brought my mother-in-law out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It was a simple family meal, warm and comforting in the familiar way these gatherings often are. Plates of food shared across the table, conversation flowing softly, the comforting rhythm of ordinary family life continuing for another year. As I watched her eating and chatting with us, I felt deeply grateful that she is still healthy and well. Ageing has a way of making us understand how precious these seemingly ordinary moments truly are.
What touched me most was thinking about her ongoing care for us even now. Despite her age, she still cooks for us once a week, quietly expressing love through food in the way many mothers do without ever needing recognition for it. There is something deeply moving about these acts of care that continue across decades. Meals prepared almost instinctively. Small acts of generosity woven into ordinary life so consistently that we sometimes forget how much love they actually contain.
As we grow older ourselves, perhaps we begin to understand our parents differently. We start noticing the invisible labour behind all the years of nurturing, cooking, worrying, preparing and caring. Things we once took for granted slowly become illuminated with tenderness.
Later that evening, I visited my own mother at her home.
My mother’s dementia has already progressed very deeply now. She can no longer really talk and is mostly unaware of her surroundings. There are moments where it feels as though the person we once knew is slowly fading further and further from reach, even while physically still here beside us. Dementia carries a very particular kind of grief because it unfolds gradually. You mourn someone while still being able to hold their hand.
Sitting with her always leaves me carrying complicated emotions. Sadness, helplessness, tenderness, exhaustion and love all existing together at once. Sometimes there are no meaningful conversations anymore, no recognition, no shared memories spoken aloud. And yet, somewhere underneath everything, the bond between mother and child still quietly exists beyond language itself.
After visiting her, we returned home and had dinner quietly.
The contrast between the two mothers in my life felt especially profound that evening. One still able to care actively for her family through meals and conversation. The other now requiring care herself as dementia slowly reshapes her world. Both reflections of motherhood in different seasons of life.
I think Mother’s Day can become more emotionally layered as we grow older. It is no longer only about celebration. It becomes about gratitude, memory, caregiving, impermanence and learning how to hold love even as life changes form around us.
This year reminded me that love does not disappear simply because someone can no longer express it in familiar ways. Sometimes love remains present quietly through touch, presence, routine and the simple act of continuing to show up.
And perhaps that, too, is a form of gratitude.
Not gratitude for perfection or easy circumstances, but gratitude for having loved deeply enough that loss and sadness exist at all.
Tonight, I feel thankful for the mothers who cared for us through food, through worry, through sacrifice and through countless invisible acts of devotion over many years. I feel grateful for health where it still exists, and heartbroken where illness has changed things irreversibly. Both emotions somehow sitting together within the same evening.
Perhaps this is part of adulthood too. Learning that gratitude and grief are often far closer to one another than we expect.
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