Leisha Today is Mother’s Day, and for some women, it is not a day filled with flowers, phone calls, grandchildren climbing into their laps, or family gathered around a table. For some mothers, it is a day of silence. That silence echoes loudly because the world often assumes mothers and children naturally remain connected forever.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with being estranged from a child. It is difficult enough when it is your daughter, someone you carried, protected, worried over, and built your life around in ways she may never fully understand. There is another layer that cuts even deeper when it is also your granddaughter. She is a child you love deeply, yet must love from a distance. She grows older without your voice, your stories, your hugs, your garden, your food, your history, or your side of things.
What makes this kind of grief especially difficult is that the world often treats it as deserved by default. The assumption becomes that if a mother is estranged, she must have failed in some unforgivable way. Very few people stop to ask how complicated families actually are. Very few ask what years of sacrifice looked like, or how much of motherhood becomes invisible once children become adults and begin rewriting the story through the lens of their own pain.
I have been told that my granddaughter will make her own choice one day, and that her parents are not influencing her thinking. Perhaps some people genuinely believe that. However, every parent knows that children absorb the emotional atmosphere around them long before they can critically examine it for themselves. They learn who feels safe to love, who is spoken about warmly, who is avoided, who is discussed with tension, and who is framed as wounded, unstable, selfish, disappointing, or wrong. Children do not form their understanding in isolation. They inherit emotional narratives long before they develop independent judgment.
That does not mean children are manipulated like puppets. It means families are ecosystems. Loyalty, silence, perception, and emotional alignment move quietly through them, often without anyone admitting it openly.
One of the hardest realities for estranged mothers is realizing that once a certain narrative takes hold, almost anything you say to explain yourself becomes further proof against you. Your grief becomes guilt. Your defense becomes manipulation. Your pain becomes self-centeredness. Meanwhile, your silence is interpreted as indifference.
There are mothers who were cruel, abusive, neglectful, controlling, or destructive, and there are adult children who genuinely needed distance to survive emotionally. That truth exists. There are also families fractured by misunderstanding, personality differences, divorce, outside influence, unresolved conflict, pride, emotional immaturity on all sides, and a culture that increasingly frames human relationships through categories of victim and offender with very little room left for complexity.
I recently read a passage discussing what was called “vindictive protectiveness,” the idea that hurt can slowly evolve into a moral permission slip for exclusion, hostility, and emotional punishment. It described how pain can shift from a desire for healing into a desire for reversal, where the suffering of another person begins to feel justified. I sat quietly with that thought for a long time because I think many estranged mothers understand this feeling intimately, even if they are afraid to say it out loud.
This is not because they deny mistakes or believe they were perfect. It is because they recognize the difference between imperfection and permanent condemnation.
Motherhood is not clean, flawless, or lived with the wisdom of hindsight while events are unfolding. Mothers raise children while exhausted, worried, financially strained, emotionally overwhelmed, physically depleted, grieving parts of their own lives, navigating marriages, illnesses, fears, work, and expectations. Many are also carrying wounds from their own upbringing that they never fully healed themselves.
Still, most mothers loved fiercely in the only ways they knew how at the time.
Today, I think of my granddaughter. I wonder whether she knows how often I think of her. I wonder whether she would like the gardens here, laugh at the ducks, walk barefoot through the soil, help make bread, pick herbs, or watch seedlings emerge after the rain. Sometimes it feels strange to love someone so deeply while being entirely absent from their life.
There is a unique helplessness in that reality.
A grandmother cannot simply force herself into a child’s life. She cannot override parental boundaries without creating more fracture. Instead, she waits, hopes, and carries love with nowhere to place it.
People often speak about protecting children from harmful relationships, and children absolutely should be protected where true harm exists. However, I also wonder what happens when children are protected from imperfect humanity itself. I wonder what happens when they are protected from reconciliation, complexity, hearing multiple sides of a story, or witnessing adults struggle, fail, forgive, soften, and try again.
Families are not courtrooms. They are living ecosystems, messy and interwoven like forests and soil webs beneath the surface. In healthy soil, diversity creates resilience. Relationships in nature survive through exchange, adaptation, and restoration, not through the permanent removal of everything that once caused stress or imbalance. Human relationships are often similar. We are shaped through rupture and repair, through difficult conversations, and through learning how to remain human to one another even when hurt exists.
Perhaps this is why I find myself turning toward the Earth more and more. Mother Earth continues giving even after being wounded. Forests regrow after fire. Soil rebuilds itself slowly after exhaustion. Microbial life returns after disruption when conditions allow nourishment and diversity to emerge again. The Earth does not love through perfection. She loves through persistence, cycles, renewal, and quiet generosity.
She feeds us even when we barely notice her.
Every handful of living soil beneath our feet contains entire worlds working in relationship. Fungi connect roots beneath forests. Microbes transform decay into nourishment. Fallen leaves become future fertility. Nothing in nature survives alone for very long. Life is built through relationship, exchange, and continual restoration.
Sometimes I think grieving mothers understand this language deeply because motherhood itself is an act of continual giving. A mother pours herself outward for years without knowing what will eventually return to her. She nourishes growth she cannot fully control. She watches children become separate beings with their own choices, loyalties, wounds, and perceptions. She learns, painfully, that love does not guarantee closeness.
And yet love continues.
Mother Earth teaches me something important about that. She does not stop offering herself because human beings become forgetful, divided, destructive, or disconnected. She continues producing beauty. She continues growing gardens after storms. She continues sending rain, flowers, seeds, medicine plants, birdsong, and harvests into the world.
There is humility in that kind of love.
Today, on Mother’s Day, I want to honor not only human mothers but the great living mother beneath all of us. The soil that fed our ancestors. The forests that shaped our breath. The waters that carried life long before any of us were born. The unseen microbial worlds that sustain every plant, every ecosystem, every animal, and every human body.
Perhaps part of healing grief is remembering that we still belong to something larger than our personal heartbreak.
When human relationships fracture, the Earth still receives us. The garden still waits patiently. Seeds still germinate in darkness. The wind still moves through trees. Birds still sing at dawn whether our hearts are broken or not.
There is comfort in that continuity.
Mother’s Day can feel especially painful for estranged mothers because there is no socially accepted ritual for this kind of grief. When a mother loses a child to death, people bring casseroles and sympathy. When a mother loses a child to estrangement, many quietly assume she earned it.
Yet some mothers are carrying unbearable sorrow silently while still loving their children deeply.
Today, I honor those mothers too.
I honor the mothers who replay conversations in their minds at night. I honor the mothers who wonder what they could have done differently. I honor the mothers who were imperfect but loving. I honor the mothers who still keep photographs tucked away. I honor the mothers who ache when they see grandmothers holding little hands in grocery stores. I honor the mothers who continue loving children who no longer speak to them. I honor the mothers who carry hope and heartbreak in the same breath.
Most of all, I honor the mothers who are slowly learning that they cannot spend the rest of their lives drowning in guilt, shame, longing, and silence.
Even with grief present, life still asks us to keep living.
And perhaps Mother Earth quietly reminds us how.
