Photo by kaboompics

Mother’s Day is here, and before we go any further — I want to pause.

Just those two words, Mother’s Day, carry so much. For some of you, they bring warmth, expansiveness, a sense of gratitude. For others, they land like a weight in your chest — a reminder of what you don’t have, what you never had, what you’ve been quietly grieving for years. And for some, there’s just a kind of flatness. An indifference that is its own complicated thing.

Wherever you fall on that spectrum, this is for you.

First, a Celebration

I want to start by celebrating the women who have a healthy, loving relationship with their moms. Genuinely. Because as someone who doesn’t have that — as someone who has watched mother-daughter duos at retreats and felt both a pang of sadness and a surge of hope — I know what it means to witness love that feels possible. That’s what we call an expander. It shows you what can exist, even when it hasn’t been your reality.

So if that’s you, I see you, and I’m celebrating you.

And now — to the rest of us.

Welcome to the Apples

In the School of MOM community, we have a name for the women who carry a strained, complicated, or non-existent relationship with their mother. We call ourselves the apples. And if you’re one of us, I want to say something that might feel counterintuitive at first:

I’m celebrating you too.

Not in a toxic positivity, “everything happens for a reason” kind of way. But in a deeply earned, I’ve-been-in-the-trenches-of-this-work kind of way. Because what I know — personally and professionally — is that the wound you carry around your mother is often the most powerful doorway into your own healing. The lack of relationship isn’t a dead end. It’s an intense nudge — sometimes a hard shove — toward the inner work that all women need, but that we apples need in a particular and profound way.

I’ll be honest with you: there was a time when I used to say that I would give up everything I’ve built — the School of MOM, all of it — for a healthy mom. In a heartbeat. And now, more than a decade on from when things really fell apart with my own mother, I have a completely different relationship to that truth. My mom’s story — the lack of relationship, the painful reality of what has and hasn’t been — has been the biggest gift of my life. It has been the doorway to everything.

I know some of you want to throw something at me when I say that. That’s okay. Hold it loosely. Because I also know what’s waiting on the other side when you do the work to tend to what you never had, what you don’t have, and what you’ve always craved.

The Real Work: Self-Worth

Here’s what’s at the heart of all of this — and what I really wanted to come and say this Mother’s Day.

The relationship we have with our mothers is foundational to our self-worth. Full stop. It shapes how we move through every relationship, how we experience our bodies, what we believe we deserve, what we allow ourselves to want.

And self-worth is not just a feel-good concept. It is the invisible architecture underneath everything you desire. If you want something — truly want it — but your subconscious doesn’t believe you are worthy of it, it will be nearly impossible to receive it. Your worthiness is the ceiling on what you think is possible. And your relationship with your mom, for better or worse, had a tremendous hand in building that ceiling.

Here’s the hopeful part: ceilings can be raised. They can be blown off entirely.

When you begin to see the wound as the doorway — when you stop treating your painful or absent maternal relationship as a sentence and start treating it as an invitation — something shifts. You don’t just start to claim what you desire. You start to desire things you never thought were available to you in the first place. You start to ask a question we love in the School of MOM, borrowed from Dr. Valerie Rain: How good can it get?

That is not a naive question. It is a radical one. And answering it — really letting yourself answer it — is the work.

You Don’t Have to Say Happy Mother’s Day

I’m not going to wish you a Happy Mother’s Day. What I’m going to say instead is this: it is Mother’s Day. Let all of it be here. The warmth and the grief. The gratitude and the anger. The hope and the heaviness.

And then, underneath all of it — let’s collectively decide to step into a new level of worthiness. Not because everything has been resolved or healed or wrapped up neatly. But because you are here, doing the work, and that already makes you one of the lucky ones.

The trigger is the gift. The wound is the doorway. And we can only walk through it together.

If you’re ready for more support on this journey, I’d love to have you. Reach out, get on the newsletter, and come find your people in the School of MOM.