Mother in Me

There is something about spring that always changes the way I see the world. As the air softens, the light stretches a little longer, and the first flowers begin to bloom, I find myself noticing life differently. Not because the season itself has changed, but because I have. Each year seems to uncover a new perspective — a deeper appreciation for growth, for evolution, and for the quiet beauty of what continues to bloom even after difficult seasons.

Mother’s Day arrives in the middle of all that change, carrying its own kind of reflection.

For a long time, this season felt closely tied to grief. In many ways, we lost our mother more and more every year before she passed almost three years ago. Alzheimer’s has a way of slowly changing the shape of someone’s presence long before they are physically gone, and each spring carried its own version of that absence. I felt it in the conversations that changed, in memories that became harder to reach together, and in the quiet recognition that time was moving differently for all of us.

And then, when she passed, the grief carried the weight of permanence. Not just change, but finality. That is the weight I’ve been learning to lighten over these past few years — not by loving or missing her less, but by allowing love, gratitude, growth, and presence to slowly take more space alongside the loss.

Because grief and love do not live separately from one another. Over time, I’ve realized love can become louder. More grounding. More present. It begins to fill spaces grief once occupied, not by replacing it, but by reminding us of everything that still exists because of it.

I notice it in the moments I’ve written about here before — the stranger in the pizza shop who shared her pregnancy news with me before almost anyone else, trusting a moment of connection between women navigating motherhood in different stages of life. I notice it in raising two sons, watching every new phase ask something different of me while somehow helping me evolve alongside them. Motherhood has a way of revealing parts of ourselves we didn’t know were there until life gently (but firmly) asks them forward.

The longer I sit inside motherhood, the more I understand that it is constantly evolving. It asks us to evolve too. To hold tightly in some seasons and loosen gently in others. To trust instincts we didn’t know we had. To become softer and stronger at the exact same time, during the exact right moments. And to recalibrate that with each child.

And one of the greatest gifts in all of this has been experiencing these stages of motherhood alongside some of my closest friends. Watching them love their children, guide their families, navigate challenges, celebrate milestones, and grow through it all has become one of the most inspiring parts of my life. I tap into them constantly for perspective, influence, reassurance, guidance, and support. In so many ways, they have become an extension of how I mother too.

The older I get, the more I realize motherhood was never meant to exist in isolation. We shape one another as much as we shape our children. Together, through all of the ordinary moments that may not seem extraordinary at the time, we are helping raise the next generation of good people — children who will hopefully move through the world with empathy, resilience, kindness, confidence, and courage.

And when I think about that, I think about my mother.

Because at the heart of everything, that is all she ever wanted. To love people well. To raise good humans. To leave the world softer and better through the way she cared for others. The older I get, the more I recognize her influence not only in me, but in the values I hope I have helped pass forward through my boys and through the way I show up for others.

When I think about my mother now, I don’t experience her as absence. I experience her as presence — not beside me, but within me. In instinct I don’t have to think through. In resilience I didn’t always recognize as inherited. In the way I respond to my sons as if something in me already knows. I see her in the strength that I now trust in myself, and in the way love moves through me in ways I once only felt but could not name.

That is what Love You More has always meant to me.

Not just loving through the beautiful moments, but recognizing what has always been there —even in the quiet, ordinary ones. These aren’t new realizations for me. Looking back, I can see that I’ve always noticed this thread running through life, in different forms and different seasons. I’ve always felt the way love shows up, multiplies, stretches, and deepens us in ways we don’t fully understand in the moment.

It’s only now, through the lens of motherhood and time, that I recognize it for what it has always been: a journey. A full circle of understanding of what I thought I was just learning, I was actually living all along.

Love doesn’t suddenly become more meaningful as we grow older — we just become more aware of its presence. More able to name what was already shaping us quietly in the background of every stage of life.

And in that way, motherhood has not changed what I know. It has clarified it. It has given shape to something I have always been walking through — the instinct to nurture, the way we carry our mothers forward in ourselves, the way connection extends beyond time, and the way love never truly stops moving, even when those we love are no longer physically by our side.

So this Mother’s Day, I find myself less focused on what has been lost and more aware of everything that remains. The people we carry with us. The love we pass forward. The women shaping our lives and our children every single day. The glorious moments that ask us to be fully present while we have them.

And maybe that is the real gift of motherhood — not that it teaches us something new, but that it helps us finally see what was always there.

Love, in every form, still blooming.