If Mother’s Day is Hard, You Are Not Alone

Why Feeling Better Starts with Connection

This Sunday is Mother’s Day, a holiday in which some women enjoy breakfast in bed, heartfelt cards, and bouquets of roses.

But for many people, Mother’s Day is a really hard day. Some people are struggling with infertility. Some people have complicated relationships with their own mothers. And some people are missing their mothers.

The authors of the book Modern Loss describe the term Freudenschade as “The sting you feel when you see a stranger having brunch with her mother, when yours is dead.”

This sting is particularly acute for those of us who - like me - will be missing their own moms this Sunday.

So, what can you do to feel better - or to help those around you who might be struggling on Sunday - feel better? Empirical research points to a very simple solution: reach out and connect.

Reaching out obviously isn’t hard. Yet most of us hesitate to do so, in part because we underestimate how good small gestures feel.

Researchers in one study first asked study participants to think about 5 different people they knew who were going through a hard time. They then asked them to think about how much each person needed support and what type of supportive message they could send to that person.

Finally, the researchers asked them to predict how the person who received such a message would feel. Would they feel awkward? Would they feel supported?

To test how accurate study participants were in their predictions, the researchers then conducted a second study. In this study participants were asked to think of someone who was facing a difficult time in their lives and could use some social support. They were then asked to write that person an email expressing some support.

But here was the most interesting part of this study:

• Participants rated how the recipient would feel about their message, including how awkward they would feel and how positively they would feel.

• Recipients of the email then rated their own reaction to receiving the message, including how awkward they felt and how positively they felt about receiving the message.

This method allowed researchers to check whether people’s predictions about how their messages would be received were accurate.

Their findings provide clear evidence that we tend to underestimate how much people going through a hard time appreciate small gestures. Even when people recognized that someone they knew was going through a hard time, they hesitated reaching out, at least in part because they overestimated how awkward such a gesture would feel and underestimated how good such a gesture would feel to the recipient.

In sum, when someone’s going through a hard time, small check-ins - an email, a text, a card - matter more than we realize.

So here’s what I do each Mother’s Day: I reach out to all of the people in my life who I know are missing their own moms that day. And I tell them that I know it’s a hard day and that I’m thinking of them.

As Brené Brown famously said, “The truth is, rarely can a response make something better - what makes something better is connection.”

And now a couple of questions for you: Is Mother’s Day - or another holiday - hard for you each year? If so, what makes you feel better? Please share in the comments!