What She Creates Love Actually Thinks About Mother's Day

Mother's Day is one of the most profitable holidays in the American retail calendar and one of the least honest.

The campaign version — flowers, brunch, breakfast in bed, gratitude flowing in one uncomplicated direction — requires you to flatten something that is rarely flat.

Motherhood contains grief. It contains women who lost children and still move through the world. Daughters whose relationship with their mothers involves more complicated feelings than the card aisle is equipped to handle. Trans mothers whose families don't acknowledge them. Women who chose not to have children and who spend the week fielding questions about it. Women who gave children up and carry that quietly, every year. Women whose mothers have died and for whom this weekend opens something that doesn't close on Monday.

None of this is secret. All of it is common. And every year the holiday asks everyone to step around it and perform gratitude.

She Creates Love doesn't make Mother's Day products. We make things for women — for the full, specific, sometimes difficult experience of being a woman in a body the world has strong opinions about. Some of those women give them as Mother's Day gifts. Some give them to themselves. Some give them to the friend who needs something that doesn't ask her to feel the right way.

The Softer Than You Think collection: affirmations for the nervous system, the body, the quiet hours. The 'I Protect My Peace' pillow for the woman who has had to fight for that peace. The 'No Is a Complete Sentence' mug for the one still practicing. The Love Is Why We Fight collection for the woman who sees clearly what's broken and refuses to look away.

These are not gifts that require a particular relationship to work. They are honest objects for women who are done performing.

If that's who you're shopping for — or if that's you — the Love Foundry is at shecreateslove.com.