Mothering Sunday

I did not grow up thinking much about Mothering Sunday.

It is only in the last few years that I have come to understand it more clearly — this old tradition, still kept in Scotland and across Britain, arriving in Lent with its themes of memory, origin, and return.

That may be part of why it catches me now.

This photo is my mother holding Rory at his baptism.

A grandmother holding her grandson in church.

A child being blessed.

Three generations gathered in a single moment.

It is a beautiful image.

It would be easy to leave it there and let people assume the story behind it is simple.

It isn’t.

My relationship with my mother has been complicated for a long time. There has been love in it, strain in it, gratitude in it, hurt in it, and more than a little unfinished business. That is true.

Another thing is true as well:

What I wrote about my mother in my book was not fair.

It came from a real place. I was writing from within my own pain, memory, confusion, and need to make sense of what had marked me. I was not inventing my hurt. But pain does not automatically make us fair. Sometimes it sharpens what was real while flattening everything else around it.

My mother never really got to tell her story herself.

She never had equal space on the page.

She never got to answer back.

And with time, I can see more clearly that she was always more than the role she played in my wound.

I can see now that she was very young.

I can see that she had crossed an ocean and was trying to build a life.

I can see that she was carrying pressures, losses, and limits I did not understand as a child, and probably did not understand fully even as an adult when I first wrote about her.

That does not erase what was hard.

It does not require dishonesty.

It does not turn pain into fiction.

But it does require fairness.

And maybe that is what Mothering Sunday opens up for me now.

Not a performance of family perfection.

Not a sentimental tribute that says less than the truth.

Something harder.

Something better.

A chance to say thank you without pretending.

A chance to honour my mother without erasing what has been difficult.

A chance to admit that someone I once wrote too narrowly was always a bigger human being than the version I put on the page.

So today I want to thank my mother.

Thank you for giving me life.

Thank you for carrying what you carried.

Thank you for the parts of yourself you poured out, whether I understood them or not.

Thank you for your love for Rory.

Thank you for standing in that church on a day that mattered.

Thank you for the faith, memory, resilience, and inheritance that came through you, however imperfectly.

This is not a post that claims everything is healed.

It is simply a more honest one.

You were more than the version of you I once wrote down.

And I know that now.

So on Mothering Sunday, across the water, where this day is being kept, I want to say it plainly:

Thank you, Mum.

For this moment.

For your place in Rory’s story.

For your place in mine.

And for the truth, however late, that a grown son sometimes only learns after he has already spoken too quickly.

This photo holds something holy for me.

Not perfection.

Not resolution.

But blessing across generations.

That is enough to say out loud.