For 19 years, I was lucky enough to have the most amazing mom ever to have lived on this earth. I That’s her in the photo, wasn’t she ridiculously beautiful?

I always loved the colors in the background, the silver lining around the Pacific waves that somehow emphasize the honey highlights in her hair. See, beautiful, right? Anyway, back to it.

Throughout my 20’s I did my best to beat back the grief, and failed more times than I’d like to admit, but eventually I learned to live without my mom.

And then I had my three boys.

And the pain that I once knew seemed to change. Though it will always be there, somehow the silver lining in life seemed a little brighter since those crazy kids showed up.

But there is still one day of the year when it’s not as easy. A day when the grief comes rolling back in, crashing around my feet like those familiar Pacific waves.

Mother’s Day.

Your newsfeed fills fast with tweets, posts and photos of your friends brunching with mom, shopping with mom, getting their nails did with mom, and flower planting with mom in those god damn adorable matching gardening gloves.

But the ones that really get you, the ones that really yank the old heartstrings, are the ones of your friends’ children with grandma. If you’re a mommyless mom, you know what I’m talking about. Mother’s Day makes you painfully aware that raising your babies without the woman that raised you just really effing sucks.

But that’s when you must remember something. The silver lining…it’s still there.

See Mother’s Day is a special day, a day to celebrate. And even though you still the feel the pain, and sometimes the loneliness leaves you gasping for air, and that despite the cold hard fact that your grief never really goes away, you were once lucky enough to have had your mom as your mom. And today’s a day to celebrate her life, your life and all the other awesome moms out there.

So ‘Like’ all those beautiful posts today, smile at the happiness around you, and hug your little ones nice and tight.

And remember one last thing.

That if each time you read your baby a book your mom once read to you, or you let them win at Chutes and Ladders just like she secretly did, or you patiently sing the 50th rendition of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ as you tuck them in at night, that each time you show them the love that she once showed you…then your mom, like mine, can never really be gone.