Mother’s Day is often presented as a universal celebration of femininity and motherly love. It is a day defined by pastel colors, sentimental commercials and the assumption that everyone has a woman in their life who fits the role of “mother.” It’s a holiday created to honor the woman who raised you. However, the holiday is grounded in the gendered perspectives of what a model family should be.

Mother’s Day has always been a problematic holiday for me. It was never because I didn’t have a mother in my life, nor was it because I had been waiting for one. It’s because the world has made people believe there is something lacking in a person’s life just because they don’t have a mother.

I always thought of my childhood as normal, and I never thought about the “what ifs” regarding a mother. Nevertheless, when May came around every year, the world around me would remind me again and again that my family is abnormal by society’s standards.

In elementary school, Mother’s Day celebrations consisted of children making cards for their moms using pink construction paper, glitter, heart-shaped stickers and markers. When a teacher handed us such a set of materials, the room would suddenly fill with excitement as everyone tried to show how much they loved their mom.

Every sticker on every card featured phrases such as “Number 1 Mom” or “I Love You, Mom” in bold letters. From an early age, it was clear to me that this holiday was geared towards a certain type of family.

I remember sitting behind a craft table with nothing to do because I had two fathers instead of one mother. Of course, there were only two ways out: to choose one of my dads as the more “motherly” one and make a card for him, or to quietly go to the computer lab and play there all day. I preferred to go to the computer lab and forget about Mother’s Day.

While yes, I could’ve bit the bullet and made a card for one of my fathers, participating felt like reinforcing a stereotype I refused to accept, the idea that in a gay relationship, one man must be the “motherly” one and the other the “fatherly” one. My dads weren’t playing the roles of a “feminine” parent and a “masculine” parent. They were simply my dads.

People often say, “Everyone has a mother,” as if biology alone defines what makes one. But a mother is not just the woman who gave birth to you or the woman who you’re biologically related to. A mother is a nurturing woman who cares for you as her own. By that definition, I did not have a mother, and I never felt the lack of one.

Having a holiday centered around parents is meant to be a celebration of care, sacrifice and unconditional love. It’s a day to honor the people who nurture us. But somewhere along the way, the holiday became less about nurturing and more about the gender of the person doing it. Instead of celebrating our parents for what they do for us, we celebrate the gendered idea of a family.

Now, I wonder how others celebrate Mother’s Day when their family doesn’t include a woman. I wonder how it works for those who have single fathers as their caregivers, or those who lost their mothers during childhood or those whose mother is abusive or neglectful.

As far as I know, the majority of schools, cards, advertisements and other occasions associated with the celebration of this day imply only one thing – a family consisting of one father and one mother. It implies that each mother in such families is nurturing, caring, loving, etc. However, I know that there are millions of exceptions to this rule.

For me, Mother’s Day became a reminder of what society refused to see. It highlighted the gap between what the world expected and what individual experience showed. Our ideas of care and nurturing are extremely gendered, much like how we assign nurturing to women and strength to men, or how we assume that love must follow a certain belief to be valid.

Maybe one day, our celebrations will catch up to our realities. Maybe we’ll learn to honor care wherever it comes from and recognize that the people who raise us deserve more than a holiday defined by gender. Maybe we as a society will understand that what makes a family is not the presence of a mother or a father, but the presence of love.