The Quiet Influence of Mothers

This week the world celebrated International Women’s Day. Our feeds were filled with stories about powerful women leading companies, building businesses, shaping industries and pushing society forward. It’s one of those moments each year when we pause and recognise the visible impact women have on the world. And rightly so. Women deserve to be celebrated for the extraordinary roles they play across every part of society.

But a week later, another day arrives in the UK that speaks to a very different kind of influence.

Mother’s Day.

It’s a quieter celebration. There are no conferences or panel discussions attached to it, no keynote speeches about leadership or equality. Instead there are flowers, cards and children attempting breakfast in bed with varying degrees of success. It’s a small, familiar ritual that plays out in homes rather than on stages.

Yet the more I thought about the timing of these two days, the more connected they began to feel.

International Women’s Day celebrates women who are visible in the world - the ones leading, building and changing things. Mother’s Day quietly reminds us where many of those women first learned who they were. Long before careers, achievements or recognition, most of us were shaped by another woman.

Our mums

The older I get, the more I realise just how powerful that influence is. Because whether we notice it or not, much of who we become begins in that early relationship. The way we see ourselves, the way we handle conflict or affection, the way we deal with pressure, independence and responsibility — so much of that emotional wiring begins long before we step into adulthood.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth about that influence.

Most of us spend adulthood either repeating our mothers’ patterns or trying to unlearn them.

Sometimes that influence shows up in beautiful ways. The patience we watched growing up. The quiet resilience our mothers carried through difficult moments. The way they showed up for the people they loved, often without recognition or applause. Those lessons stay with us and often appear later in our lives in ways we don’t immediately recognise.

But sometimes the influence is more complicated.

Mothers are human. They carry their own histories, pressures and unresolved struggles. They are navigating life at the same time they are raising children. Sometimes they get things right. Sometimes they get things wrong. Often they are simply doing the best they can with the tools and understanding they have at that moment in time.

Yet their influence runs deep.

The stories we tell ourselves about who we are often begin in those early years. Whether we feel confident or uncertain, whether we expect love to feel safe or unpredictable, whether we believe we are capable or constantly feel we have something to prove. These beliefs are rarely formed consciously. They are shaped quietly, through everyday experiences that accumulate over time.

I’ve been thinking about this more recently as a parent myself. Raising a teenager has a way of making you suddenly aware that the things you say, the way you react and the environment you create all leave a mark. Sometimes that mark is obvious. Sometimes it takes years to appear.

Parenting has a strange time delay built into it.

The influence you have today often doesn’t reveal itself until long after the moment has passed. And that can feel both powerful and terrifying at the same time. Because no parent gets everything right. There is no script and no perfect formula. Just millions of people trying to raise children while navigating their own lives at the same time.

My mum died just before my daughter entered her tween years, and losing her changed the way I look at motherhood. When you’re younger, your mum is simply “mum”. The person who keeps life running. The one who somehow knows where things are, fixes problems before you even realise they exist and creates a sense of stability that feels completely normal at the time.

But as you grow older, something shifts.

You begin to see the woman behind that role. You realise she had her own dreams before she became a parent. Her own fears. Her own moments of uncertainty. You begin to understand that while she was raising you, she was also figuring out life herself.

That realisation softens a lot of things.

Because motherhood isn’t about perfection.

It’s about influence.

And that influence can be gentle, messy, complicated or quietly powerful. Often it is a mixture of all those things.

Now, raising a teenager myself, I’m much more aware of that influence. Not in the big dramatic moments, but in the smaller ones. The conversations we have. The way I react when things go wrong. The values that quietly show up in how we live day to day.

I often wonder which parts of me Lola will carry with her into adulthood. The strengths. The habits. The ways of seeing the world. And inevitably, the things she will one day decide to do differently.

Because that’s what each generation does.

We carry parts of the women who raised us, and we reshape other parts along the way.

Perhaps that’s the quiet connection between International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day. One celebrates the visible achievements of women. The other reminds us that long before those achievements appear, there was usually another woman somewhere in the background helping shape the person who made them possible.

Not perfectly.

But profoundly.

And in one way or another, that influence stays with us for the rest of our lives.