You would think that as the founder of a company called Mother of Invention, I might use our national holiday dedicated to motherhood as an opportunity to wax poetic about moms.

I’ve been sitting with this all day, and here’s how I’ve netted out: the breakfast in bed, the flowers, the big gestures — while all lovely — feel a little antithetical to the parts of motherhood I’m actually trying to reframe and celebrate.

Mother of Invention is a company built around the small, unsexy moments. The ones that don’t make it onto the Mother’s Day card.

My daughters woke me up at 5:30 this morning, bursting with excitement. I had a wrapped Eric Carle book shoved into my face and my older daughter read me a singsong story about how amazing moms are. My younger daughter made sure I saw she had spelled out her name on her hand-drawn card. (It’s always a bit of a competition!)

It was the sweetest thing. And if I’m being totally honest: I would have traded four minutes of that excitement for one extra hour of sleep.

I am sprinting so hard as a founder right now. I’ve been throwing investor events, sharpening my pitch with every one. I’m a semi-finalist for TEDx. I’m pushing my design team and factories to move faster, tweaking my go-to-market strategy, riding high after receiving glowing feedback on my product from a room of 100 pregnant and new moms.

All of that on the business front — and simultaneously trying to be ferociously present with my daughters before I leave town for business, remembering to make grandma mother’s day videos, returning calls from family, responding to the genuinely kind and earnest Happy Mother’s Day texts flooding my phone.

Mother’s Day, as it’s culturally practiced, asks mothers to feel something. To overflow. To be visibly, demonstrably full of gratitude and warmth and the luminous weight of it all. To perform the joy of the thing, or at minimum, to receive the performance with appropriate radiance.

And I just — don’t have it today!

What I have is the list above, a body that wanted one more hour of sleep, and the particular exhaustion of someone who loves her work and loves her children and is trying to do right by both simultaneously.

So here is the permission slip I am writing for myself, and for anyone else who needs it today:

You are allowed to be empty on Mother’s Day.

You are allowed to receive the sweet gift and also wish for sleep. You are allowed to love your children completely and still feel the weight of everything you are carrying alongside that love. You are allowed to show up today without a surplus.

Showing up without a surplus, when you have nothing left, is in fact the whole demonstration.

Love doesn’t require fuel. It just keeps going.

And sometimes you have to get to empty to make space to be filled up again.

-Maggie