Redefining Mother’s Day: Embracing All Maternal Influences with Joy

Nadja Maril
3 min readMay 11, 2024

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More than once, I celebrated Mother’s Day by honoring someone who is not a “mother,” because why should mothers have all the fun? What about woman who have acted in the capacity of mothers: aunts, friends, neighbors, cousins, nannies, older siblings? Cast your net wide, and I’m sure you can think of plenty of people who have cared for you in a maternal way, who may not have any living or available children to celebrate with on Mother’s Day.

In my twenties, as a young mother, more than once we celebrated Mother’s Day with my first husband’s Aunt Catherine, who had no children of her own, but doted on our two little boys. She said we were celebrating me and I said we were celebrating her!

is there someone who has been good to you or members of your family? It’s not too late to call them or drop by with a home baked cake or a bouquet of flowers. Mother’s Day, has been an official holiday in the United States for 110 years. How you celebrate and who you honor, is still evolving.

For many, our relationships with our mothers is complicated. Put several generations together and the pressure is on as to who to celebrate Mother’s Day with? Should you be with your mother or your grandmother? Should you be honoring your mother or the mother of your children?

My own mother is deceased. We often saw the world differently, but on Mother’s Day I set aside some time to remember her fondly. So here’s a short prose piece, published a few years ago in Lumiere Review, “We Bought the Kelly Green Dress,” I’d like to share.

WRITING PROMPT: Jot down quickly a memory of your Mom that causes you to smile. What were the details, that set your mother apart from other mothers? Think about the sound of her voice or her mannerisms. Does she or did she have a favorite expression she often used? If you could speak with your mother (and you can’t because she is dead or estranged), what would you like to tell her? Review what you’ve written. Pick out the most powerful sentence and start over again. Maybe you’ll discover something you’d like to further develop or maybe you’ll learn something new about yourself. It’s all part of the writing process.

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Published by Nadja Maril

Nadja Maril’s prose and poetry has been published in literary magazines that include Change Seven, Lunch Ticket, Thin Air, and The Compressed Journal of Creative Arts.. Author of two children’s books illustrated with paintings by her father Herman Maril and two reference books on antique American Lighting, she is currently completing a novel and a garden memoir chapbook of poetry, recipes and prose. A former journalist and magazine editor, Nadja has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine and is a Contributing Editor to Old Scratch Press. To read more of her work and follow her weekly blog posts, visit Nadjamaril.com https://nadjamaril.com/ View more posts

Originally published at http://nadjamaril.com on May 11, 2024.

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Nadja Maril
Nadja Maril

Written by Nadja Maril

Writer, Poet, Author and Dreamer.

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