MOTHER’S DAY ARRIVES with its usual trappings: pink-hued advertisements, pre-written messages of gratitude, flowers ordered in haste.

It is a day meant to honour, but it often flattens, reducing something vast and intricate into a singular, sentimental note. Motherhood, in all its forms, refuses such easy containment. It is a shape-shifter — expanding, contracting, dissolving, resurfacing. It is a force that is both intimate and political, held within the body, but also written across history, policy and culture.

To mother is to bear witness. To be a mother, to have a mother, to lose a mother, to reject or long for motherhood — all of these experiences tether us to something deeper than biology. It is to be inextricably bound to another, through birth, through care, through something as ephemeral as memory. It is to hold and to be held, to let go and to be let go of, again and again. But in a world that prizes productivity over care, that measures worth in efficiency rather than tenderness, mothering is too often sidelined, unspoken, made invisible.

Motherhood is also a site of power, of resistance. It is a force that states and institutions seek to control, whether through reproductive laws, economic policies, or the policing of bodies and borders. The question of who gets to mother, under what conditions and with what support, is a question of justice. And yet, too often, the work of mothering — its exhaustion, its quiet triumphs, its sheer persistence — goes unseen, unrecognised, unpaid.

And then there is grief. The grief of losing a mother, of being estranged from one, of longing for a child, or for a version of motherhood that never materialised. The grief of watching a child grow away from you, of failing, of struggling, of reckoning with the ways motherhood remakes and undoes a self. To mother is to experience a thousand tiny deaths, and to love through them anyway.

But motherhood is more than just a personal experience. It is political, historical and cultural. It carries the weight of expectation and myth, of labour both seen and unseen, of stories too often left untold. In Ireland, it is impossible to speak of motherhood without speaking of history — without looking at the Magdalene Laundries, the industrial schools, the babies lost in Tuam.

It is impossible to speak of motherhood without speaking of the abortion referendum, without acknowledging the women forced onto planes to access medical care, or the collective reckoning that came when the country finally said ‘enough’. And it is impossible to speak of motherhood without conjuring the image of the ‘Irish Mammy’—both venerated and burdened, celebrated for her sacrifices, but often expected to give too much.

This Mother’s Day, as bouquets of flowers are bought and cards signed, perhaps it is also a time to sit with the contradictions of motherhood: its joys, its griefs, its impossible demands, its quiet revolutions.

Long before........

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