“Happy Mother’s Day”

Published in the May, 2026 issue of Porter Ranch Living Magazine

Have a seat, my dear, while I tell you what I want for Mother’s Day.
A bouquet of hydrangea and white roses has always been pleasing to my eyes.
Pretty bling to grace my neck or wrist is also a thoughtful choice.
Plenty of chocolate has made this day extra delightful in the past, and continues to be a tasty choice.
Yet, if you want to know the truth, there’s really just one thing my heart desires.

Make hearing my voice a priority, love.
Open your mind to my wisdom, priorities, values, and opinions.
Take my advice, or at least give it some weight in your consideration.
Hear me.
Even when what I’m saying may not make sense to you now, respect me enough to trust there’s some nugget of gold you will find, if you look.
Remember, the life I’ve lived has been powerful, though not as free or flashy as it might have been.
Slow down and let me influence your life.

Dare to give me a different sort of gift this Mother’s Day.
And find that you will be on the receiving end of unimaginable blessings.
Yet, I confess that I must lead by example, take my own advice, and start listening to myself.

Being Heard is the Secret Mother's Day Gift We Really Want

When I first wrote this poem, I thought I was writing about what mothers want from the people they love. Flowers. Sweetness. Attention. Appreciation. A willingness to listen.

But as I sat with the words more deeply, I realized the poem was quietly speaking back to me, too.

Especially that final line:

“Yet, I confess that I must lead by example, take my own advice, and start listening to myself.”

Motherhood has a way of teaching us how to care for everyone else first. We learn to anticipate needs before they are spoken. We become translators of emotions, schedulers of lives, carriers of invisible labor. We listen constantly — to children, partners, coworkers, parents, friends, communities.

And somewhere in all that listening, many mothers slowly lose the sound of their own voice.

This poem became a gentle reminder to return to it.

The opening lines intentionally lean into the familiar traditions of Mother’s Day — flowers, jewelry, chocolate, all the beautiful tokens of affection we associate with celebration. And those things are lovely. There is joy in being adorned, treated, remembered, and celebrated.

But beneath those surface gifts is often a deeper longing: to feel seen. To feel heard. To feel valued not only for what we do, but for who we are.

The line:

“Make hearing my voice a priority, love,”

lands differently for me now than when I first wrote it.

I no longer hear it only as a request from a mother to her children or family. I hear it as an invitation mothers can offer themselves and one another.

Hear your own voice.
Hear your own exhaustion.
Hear your own desires.
Hear your own wisdom.
Hear the quiet places within you that have been waiting patiently for your attention.

So many women have been conditioned to keep pouring from an empty well. To keep nurturing without replenishment. To keep showing up while privately running on emotional fumes. We celebrate mothers for their selflessness, but rarely encourage them to pause long enough to restore themselves.

Yet no well can pour endlessly without being refilled.

Sometimes replenishment looks like solitude and silence. Sometimes it looks like prayer, reflection, creativity, or rest. Sometimes it looks like women gathering in community and remembering they are not alone in what they carry.

And when I step back and look at this through a wider lens — through community and economic development — I see how deeply personal this experience actually is and how broadly it scales across society.

The invisible labor of caregiving is not only emotional; it is structural. It shapes workforce participation, access to opportunity, stability in households, and the resilience of entire communities.

When caregivers are stretched too thin, the ripple effects show up everywhere — in health outcomes, in economic mobility, in leadership capacity, in the quiet burnout that so many women normalize in order to keep everything functioning.

Too often, women become the shock absorbers for systems that depend on our resilience but rarely replenish our capacity.

What this reveals, through a community and economic development lens, is that we have built systems that quietly rely on unpaid care labor to function. Economies assume the presence of someone — most often a woman — who will absorb the gaps: childcare, eldercare, emotional labor, and the volunteer work that sustains schools, families, and nonprofits.

Yet this work is rarely reflected in how we measure economic health or opportunity. So while we treat housing, healthcare, and workforce development as separate systems, we often overlook the caregiving foundation that determines whether people can fully participate in them at all.

If we are serious about strengthening communities and improving economic outcomes, caregiving must no longer remain invisible. It has to be recognized and supported as essential infrastructure. That means designing policies, workplaces, and communities that do not assume limitless capacity from women, but instead distribute care more equitably and sustainably.

It also means valuing rest and replenishment not as personal luxuries, but as conditions for a functioning society — because resilience cannot be sustained when the people carrying it are depleted.

Because before we are systems or roles or responsibilities, we are human beings.

And so Mother’s Day becomes not only a reflection on care in the world, but a return to care within ourselves.

Am I listening to myself?
Am I nurturing the woman beneath the responsibilities?
Am I allowing others to pour into me, too?

And if the answer is no, perhaps there is no shame in stopping for a moment.

To breathe.
To rest.
To receive.
To replenish the well from which we give.

Not because we have failed, but because we are human.

And because all of us, including mothers, deserve mothering sometimes.