Your article is very heartfelt and moving. Please accept my condolences.

My mom is long dead. When she died it did not affect me much. I wondered what was wrong with me. She was a good enough mom but also an alcoholic so things were, and are, complicated.

For the first time in our nearly 29 years of marriage, I gave my wife a Mother’s day gift this year. I’d always brushed it aside with, “You’re not my mother.” That may seem cold — because it is — but I long attributed the failure of my first marriage at least in part to my surreptitious and largely unconscious efforts to make my ex into a surrogate mother.

I finally came around to realize that Mother’s Day is not about me and is important to my wife so WTF was my problem all these years?