Mother’s Day is the most difficult holiday of the year for me. As someone who has been fairly active on social media for the better part of two decades and is pretty open with my life in general, I’ve never shared this part of my story until fairly recently. After all these years, it still makes me feel raw and vulnerable. But back in 2022, I posted this on Facebook for the first time, thinking it might be an appropriate time to finally do so, and today I wanted to reformat it and share via my blog as I reflect on these same things again on Mother’s Day 2025.

The painful truth is my own mother is no longer a part of my life due to her own toxicity. When I was young, I was quite fond of her and actually a bit of a mama’s boy. But when I was 5 years old, my parents divorced. My younger brother was only a few months old, and our dad was awarded custody of the two of us. And rather than stay close to us boys, our mother moved from Little Rock back to Oklahoma. At first, we would have the ‘normal’ visits of a weekend each month or so and various holidays where we’d see her. But after a while, her involvement was much less frequent. She would just kind of pop back in our lives about every 4 years or so. I’d see her around 4-5th grade, then not until 9th grade, then my High School graduation, then my Senior year of college.

When I was about 14 years old I finally started to realize how she would manipulate my brother and me against my dad and stepmom. It came to a head when she told me one day that my dad doesn’t really love me because he knew deep down I wasn’t ‘his’. She then proceeded to tell me how back in 1986, she had been sleeping with another man when she got pregnant. She always knew I was really that man’s biological son, even though she had married my dad. So, she started to send me pictures of this other man as well as his kid. Both of whom did, in fact, look a lot like me. And really, to be honest, it wasn’t a big stretch to see that he was likely my biological father, even if my mother was using that information to try turn me against my dad. Eventually, through further complicating events involving my mom that occurred when I was in college, I sought some wise counsel about what to do and made the tough decision to cut ties with her altogether due to her pernicious behavior. My own mother.

In one sense, it really wasn’t like we had a relationship. Someone showing up in and out of your life every 4-5 years throughout your childhood and adolescent years isn’t someone you feel particularly connected to. And yet I have come to find that this lack of a mother relationship, combined with the hurtful things she had done, brought me such strange, deep emotional wounds. On the one hand, I feel like there’s this gaping hole in my heart where a mother’s love should be. My mom wasn’t at my wedding. She hasn’t met my wife or any of my kids. They’ll never know her. I don’t have any pleasant memories of her outside of when I was a small child. And yet, in that empty space there is also this dull pain that still exists.

Now, most of my daily life is pretty normal. God has graciously given me other women who filled some of that gap… my stepmom, my beloved Grandmama, and now my amazing wife and mother to our kids. But Mother’s Day is when this all just hits me. This is the time of year, I find myself feeling the weight of it, and it usually catches me by surprise. And it is just so hard. Some years, even still, I’ll cry quite a bit. Other years I just feel numb. But most years I feel melancholy to some degree surrounding this holiday. All over this woman who should’ve been my mother but chose her own self-centered, toxic path instead. It just hurts.

But I share all of that to say this: I found out about 15 years ago that my mother had an abortion before I was born. This added a whole new dimension to the complicated mess of emotions and thoughts I already had towards her. Even as an adult, this news really rocked me. The only way I can describe it is that it suddenly felt like I had experienced a very narrow escape. I remember feeling a bit startled by this information, and yet also just truly thankful to be alive, to be quite honest. You see, she was 21 when I was born, which means she was likely a teenager when she had the abortion. So here was a woman who, when it came to me, had been impregnated by another man, then married my dad (only 19 years old himself at the time), and she had had at least one abortion before this. All of which left me with this one harrowing thought: she could’ve just as easily aborted me. She was still so young, unmarried, and poor. But for whatever reason, she chose life this time.

My mother was so, so problematic. The woman who constantly looked out for her own self interests above mine. The woman who smoked while pregnant with me, and while I was a young kid, which led to me going to the hospital. The woman who chose to move away from her kids. The woman who, time after time, tried to turn us against our father. The woman who refused to pay tens of thousands in child support, all while my dad raised two boys on his own. The woman who I find myself simply referring to her as ‘Donna’ or my ‘birth mother’ the very rare times I do speak of her. The woman who should’ve been my mom. The woman who created this ‘mother wound’ that I still feel all these years later.

And yet, she’s the woman who chose life for me. And that will forever be the one thing for which I hold a great deal of gratitude towards her. As I look around at my own five beautiful, smart, funny children and my God-send of a wife, and as I consider this life and ministry that God has blessed me with… I can’t help but be thankful for the same woman who has brought me so much pain. Because by choosing life, she has brought me so much more joy.

So, Happy Mother’s Day to all those women who’ve given life. Complicated as it may be, it is always better than the alternative.