Experiencing Interruptions?

35 Million Mothers Mother's Day

Mother's Day and Father's Day are celebrated each year by millions of families — but for an estimated 35 million mothers in the United States alone, these holidays carry a different weight. They are days of absence, of silence, of a grief that the world around them rarely acknowledges.

This film is our answer to that silence.

35 million mothers in the U.S. have experienced pregnancy loss, stillbirth, or the death of a child at any age. That is 1 in 4 women. They are in your family. They are in your church. They are in your workplace. They are in every room you walk into.

They are still mothers. They always will be.

We asked bereaved mothers one simple question: What does Mother's Day feel like when your child is gone?

Their answers will stay with you.

If this film moved you, please share it. Every share is an act of advocacy. Every view tells a bereaved mother: you are seen. You are not alone. You are still a mother.

  • Terri Yates
    Director
    The First Holidays - https://thefirstholidays.com/
  • Augusto Failde
    Producer
    The First Holidays - https://thefirstholidays.com/
  • La-Tonya Hatcher
    Key Cast
    The First Holidays - https://thefirstholidays.com/
  • Angelina Orlando
    Key Cast
  • Pamela Maugile
    Key Cast
  • Maria Constanten
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Runtime:
    10 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    May 27, 2026
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Terri Yates

Terri Yates is a first-time filmmaker, bereaved mother, and dedicated volunteer with My Grief Angels Inc. — a public non-profit organization supporting bereaved families across the United States. She came to documentary filmmaking not through film school or industry ambition, but through the specific and irreplaceable authority of lived experience: she has lost a child herself, and she has sat with the particular silence that descends every second Sunday of May.

It is that silence — and her refusal to accept it — that brought this film into being.

As a volunteer with My Grief Angels Inc., Terri has spent years walking alongside other bereaved parents, bearing witness to their stories, and channeling her grief into advocacy. When she conceived of "35 Million Mothers Mother's Day", she did not pitch it as an outsider asking questions about loss. She brought it to her community as one of them — a mother who knows the weight of an empty chair, who understands the specific loneliness of a holiday that was not built to hold her.

What Terri brings to this film that no amount of technical training could provide is the trust of the women in front of her camera. They did not agree to share their most private grief with a filmmaker. They agreed to share it with someone who already understood — someone who did not need the loss explained, only witnessed.

For Terri, directing this film was itself an act of grief, of advocacy, and of love. She gathered a community of volunteers, bereaved mothers, and storytellers around a shared conviction: that 35 million mothers in the United States deserve to be seen, named, and honored on the one day the world celebrates motherhood.

She is one of them. This film is hers — and theirs.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I did not set out to make a documentary. I set out to make sure that 35 million mothers — mothers like me — knew they were not forgotten.

I have lost a child. I know what Mother's Day feels like when the person who made you a mother is no longer here. I know the particular cruelty of a holiday that arrives every year on a fixed date, surrounded by flowers and photographs and brunches and celebration, and does not make room for the loss you carry. I know what it is to smile through it, or to hide from it, or to simply endure it — and to wonder, in the quietest part of yourself, whether anyone notices that you are missing from the celebration.

As a mother with other children, I understand how the day is deeply complex — mixed with feelings of immense love and profound sadness; experiencing the joy of spending time with my children while simultaneously, and silently feeling the heartache for my child who is no longer present.

I became a volunteer with My Grief Angels Inc. because I needed a community of people who understood that silence — and I found one. In the time since, I have walked alongside hundreds of bereaved mothers, and I have heard the same thing, over and over, in different voices, from different losses, at different stages of grief: nobody talks about what Mother's Day feels like for us.

This film is my answer to that.

Every mother who sat in front of our camera did so as an act of courage I do not take lightly. Grief is a private thing. Grief on camera, on behalf of a cause, in the hope that someone somewhere will feel less alone — that asks something enormous of a person. I am grateful beyond words for every mother who said yes. They are not subjects of this film. They are its heart.

What I hope festival audiences receive from this film is not pity, and not sadness as an abstract feeling. What I hope they receive is specificity — a particular face, a particular name, a particular date on a calendar that changed everything. Because grief becomes impossible to ignore when it becomes specific. And these mothers, these stories, these names — they deserve to be impossible to ignore.

Our ask is not complicated. We are not asking the world to mourn. We are asking for a widening — of language, of awareness, of the simple acknowledgment that Mother's Day belongs to every mother, including those whose children are no longer here to celebrate with them. A few words at a church service. A moment of recognition in a card. A colleague who thinks to check in. A holiday that says: we see you. You are still a mother. Remembering us and our children “Honors Us”, too.

We are 35 million. We are in every community, every family, every room.

And we made this film, together, as volunteers — not because we had resources or industry access, but because we had something more powerful than either: we had the truth of our own lives, and the refusal to keep it quiet one more year.

This film is the door. We are asking the world to open it.