When Mother's Day is for everyone else

Mothering Sunday, or Mother's Day has a very particular atmosphere around it.

The cards appear in the shops weeks in advance, pastel coloured and full of tidy messages about appreciation, gratitude and breakfast in bed. Social media fills with smiling photographs of flowers and handmade cards, and the whole thing carries a gentle but unmistakable suggestion that this is a day when mothers should feel celebrated...and sometimes it is.

But for many families, especially those raising neurospicy children, Mothering Sunday can feel slightly different. Not worse exactly, just… different. The neat little story that the greeting cards tell doesn’t always match the way real family life works.

If you have a child whose brain is wired a little differently, you will probably know what I mean.

The organisation involved in remembering the day, planning ahead, buying a card, hiding it, remembering where it was hidden and then producing it at the right moment is actually quite a complicated chain of executive function tasks. For a child who already spends most of their energy navigating school expectations, social rules and the general noise of everyday life, that kind of planning simply isn’t going to rise to the top of the priority list.

Which means that for some mums, Mother's Day quietly passes by with very little acknowledgement at all.

I remember the first time this really landed for me.

Lou was tiny at the time, still at nursery, and Mothering Sunday came and went without so much as a card. Dave carried on as though it were a completely ordinary Sunday, which to be fair it mostly was. It wasn’t until later that I realised it simply hadn’t occurred to him that the day applied to me as well now. I gently mentioned it, he looked absolutely horrified, and we both had a laugh about it in the end.

But, if I'm honest, there was still a little sting there.

That feeling is surprisingly common. Not because our children don’t love us, but because the way they express love doesn’t always line up neatly with calendar dates and cultural expectations.

A neurospicy child might forget Mothering Sunday entirely, and then appear at your side on a random Tuesday with a pebble they found on the pavement because it looked interesting and they thought you might like it. They might leave you a drawing on the kitchen table in October, or sit next to you on the sofa and chatter away about something they’ve just discovered with enormous enthusiasm.

Love, for them, tends to appear in the everyday moments rather than in the ceremonial ones and once I understood that, Mothering Sunday (and my birthday!), stopped feeling quite so loaded.

It helped to shift the focus slightly. Instead of measuring the day by what didn’t happen, I started noticing all the tiny ways Lou showed affection throughout the rest of the year. The spontaneous hugs, the enthusiastic sharing of whatever was currently fascinating her, the way she still pops into the kitchen just to tell me a random thought even now she’s older.

Those moments count.

More than that, they are often the truest reflection of the relationship you have with your child.

If Mothering Sunday has ever left you feeling a bit flat, it can help to widen the lens slightly and think about the whole picture rather than the single day. Parenting a neurospicy child often means adjusting expectations that the world assumes are universal. Milestones arrive in different shapes, celebrations look slightly different, and the small everyday wins tend to matter far more than the big symbolic gestures.

There are also some gentle ways to make the day feel kinder if it’s one that tends to carry a little emotional weight.

Some families decide to lower the stakes altogether and treat it as a relaxed family day rather than a performance. A walk, a favourite meal, or simply a slower Sunday together can feel far more genuine than waiting for a perfectly organised surprise that was never realistic in the first place.

Others quietly build their own traditions around it. A shared breakfast somewhere nice, a trip out to see the first signs of spring, or even a simple family “reset day” where everyone gets to choose something small that makes them happy.

And sometimes the most helpful thing is simply acknowledging the reality of it. It's allowed to feel a little complicated. We're just thinking here about you as a parent, but if you start to factor in people who are/have been the mother role in your life, then the web gets even more tangled.

You can love your child deeply and still wish, just occasionally, that the world’s version of Mother's Day matched your own life a little more closely. Both of those things can exist at the same time without cancelling each other out.

The truth is that most children, neurospicy or not, do not measure their love in cards and flowers. They measure it in the quiet certainty that you are there. The person who listens to their stories, notices their worries, celebrates their odd little interests and stands beside them while they work out how the world fits together.

That kind of love does not arrive neatly wrapped once a year. Instead, it shows up in hundreds of small, ordinary moments, usually at the most inconvenient times!

When you look at it that way, Mothering Sunday becomes just one tiny dot in a much bigger picture.