Some of you know Cheryl Strayed as the writer behind Wild, but before that she wrote an anonymous advice column called Dear Sugar — a place where people brought their hardest, most tangled truths, and Sugar met them with a kind of fierce, tender honesty that made you feel less alone in your own mess. Her responses to the letters are riveting and beautiful and captured in the book called Tiny Beautiful Things.

As “Anonymous,” I decided to write to Sugar about something so many of us carry but never say: the impossible knot of loving a parent who has also hurt us. My mother reacted with anger and harsh words when I came out. She later died without ever taking those words back. 

This isn’t a typical Mother’s Day post. I’m supposed to be honouring my mother, and in so many ways I want to — and maybe I actually am. My mother was the backbone of our family, and she will always be one of the great loves of my life. But after a lifetime of adoration, we ended up with a complicated relationship, shaped in painful ways by my coming out. I wish that weren’t true with all my heart. 

What is true though is that I forgive her. And I still hurt deeply. And it’s also true that I am now left to this sort of lifelong quest of trying to make sense of the chasm between devotion and pain, between understanding my mother’s wounds and still feeling my own.

She is not here to defend herself or to do things differently. And she doesn’t need to — she remains as loved for all the good and precious things she is, and was, to me as she ever was. It’s just that her own wounds were showing.

I know I’m not alone in having a mother who was both a source of strength and a source of sorrow. So many of us carry a version of this story. My own children do, too. But silence can make you believe you’re the only one navigating love that doesn’t fit neatly into celebration. 

I’m learning that speaking the truth, even gently, is its own kind of honouring — it’s own kind of mothering. And I’ve learned that Mother’s Day, for some of us, is not simple. It’s a day full of memory and ache and gratitude and longing, all braided together.

I wrote to Sugar as Anonymous —and then I imagined what Sugar would say back to me as one way I can begin to touch this.

May it meet you wherever you are.

Dear Sugar,

I’m writing because I don’t know what to do with this ache I’m carrying. My mother died seven years ago, and ever since, I’ve been trying to untangle the knot left in me. When I came out to her, she said things that cut deeply and I still feel the sting. While we put things back together, it was never the same. We never talked much about what was said. And she died with those words still hanging in the air between us, like a door that closed.

In writing this, I’m afraid that it will sound like I’m tarnishing her memory. I’m not. I love her so fiercely still. I remember, more than anything, that she was good in so many ways. She held our family together with a strength that felt mythic. And I see her so much differently now.

I can see now how much pain she lived inside, how much of what she said came from her own fear and wounding. But understanding her doesn’t make the hurt disappear. It only makes the whole thing more tender, more bewildering, more impossible to sort.

I’m trying to hold the full truth of who she was, but it feels like standing in a chasm: on one side, the mother I adored; on the other, the mother who broke my heart.  I don’t know how to honour her without pretending the hurt wasn’t real. I’m afraid that speaking this aloud will make people see only the fracture, not the lifetime of love that came before it.

But keeping quiet feels like its own kind of betrayal — of myself, of the truth, even of her.

I guess I’m asking how to live with both — the love and the pain — without losing my footing. How to let the truth breathe without letting it swallow the goodness that was also real. How to carry a mother who was both my shelter and my wound.

Signed,

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

There are some letters that arrive like a hand pressed to the sternum — firm and yet trembling, full of a truth that’s been carried too long. Yours is one of them. I can feel the weight of what you’ve been holding: the love for your mother that refuses to die, and the wound she left in you that refuses to heal simply because she’s gone.

Grief is rarely a single emotion. It’s a whole unruly orchestra. And you, dear one, are trying to conduct a symphony in which the violins are playing devotion while the brass section is blaring betrayal. No wonder you feel torn in two.

You loved your mother fiercely. And she loved you. That love didn’t vanish when she failed you. It didn’t vanish when she said the words she should never have said. It didn’t vanish when she died without taking them back. Love is stubborn like that. It roots itself in us, even when the soil is rocky.

But hear this: your love for her does not invalidate your pain, and your pain does not invalidate your love. Both are true. Both are real. Both deserve a seat at the table.

You say you see her differently now — that you understand the hurt she carried, the limitations she lived inside. That’s a profound and generous clarity. But understanding someone’s wounds doesn’t erase the wounds they gave you. Compassion is not a magic trick that makes the past disappear. It’s simply a light that lets you see the landscape more honestly.

You’re not failing because you can’t let it go cleanly. You’re not failing because the hurt still flares. You’re not failing because you wish she had been braver, kinder, more whole. You’re human. You’re grieving not only the mother you had, but the mother you deserved.

Forgiveness — if it comes — doesn’t arrive as a single sweeping gesture. It comes in fragments. In moments. It comes when you allow yourself to hold the complexity instead of trying to resolve it. You don’t have to choose between loving her and being hurt by her. You don’t have to collapse your experience into something tidy.

You can say: She was my mother and I adored her.

You can say: She hurt me in ways that still echo in me.

You can say: I see now why she was the way she was.

You can say: That doesn’t make it okay.

You can say all of it, because all of it is true.

The more honestly you let yourself feel the whole truth, the more space you create for healing. Not the healing that erases the scar, but the healing that lets you live with it without shame.

Your mother’s story ended before she could rewrite that chapter. But yours hasn’t. You get to decide how you carry this. You get to decide what meaning you make from it. You get to decide how you speak to yourself now — with the tenderness she couldn’t muster, with the acceptance she couldn’t give, with the love she didn’t know how to show.

You deserved better from her in that moment. And you deserve gentleness from yourself now.

Take heart, dear one. You’re walking a hard road, but you’re walking it with your eyes open. That’s courage. Grace. The beginning of peace.

What happened between you and your mother — the hurt, the silence, the words she never took back — is not the sum total of your life together. It does not erase her goodness. It does not cancel the moments when she held you, taught you, laughed with you, or loved you in the ways only she could.

Mother–daughter relationships are some of the most intricate tapestries we ever weave: threads of devotion knotted with disappointment, strands of tenderness tangled with fear, whole sections of beauty sitting right beside the places where the pattern breaks. You’re allowed to hold the whole tapestry, not just the torn corner.

And tomorrow — Mother’s Day — will likely feel like standing at the edge of that tapestry, unsure which part to touch. It may ache. It may comfort. It may confuse you. Let it. Let the day be whatever it is. Let yourself feel whatever rises. There is no correct way to honour a mother who was both your shelter and your storm.

If all you can do tomorrow is breathe and remember that love and pain can coexist, that will be enough.

Yours,

Sugar