May is the month of significant rituals. Mother’s Day celebrates and honors the calling to be a mother. We can be a mother of children, animals, plants, projects, coworkers or students. For all of us this annual ritual can bring up positive, rewarding emotions and also challenging emotions of loss, sadness and failure. We must teach mothers about the power of grace in acceptance and forgiveness.

We can agonize over what we did not do as mothers or what was absent from our own mothers mothering. With blended families, divorce, mental illness and most of us working mothers, there are many places we can go to explore what we did not do. But the fact is, “the past is over.”  The past is done. Most of us did the best we could with what knowledge and resources we had access to.  It is self torture to play the “Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda game.”

So on this Mother’s Day say to your self with grace and acceptance, “ I did the best I could.”  When it comes to reflections of your own Mother you can also add, “She did the best she could.” It is impossible to completely understand the physical, mental and spiritual world our mothers experienced. Our own children may find it difficult to understand where we were in our mothering years.

There is a powerful grace in acceptance and forgiveness of what is now, in this present moment of life. Celebrate the miraculous life that all mothering creates in this magnificent world.