It's impossible to escape Mother's Day.

While the intent is to show some love for the first person with whom we are wired to bond, it can be a painful day for many. It's an occasion touched with grief for anyone who lost a mother too young, and for women who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child.

But there's another group rarely discussed around the commercial celebration of motherhood: those who were raised by unloving, abusive or narcissistic mothers.

Across cultures, a mother is considered synonymous with selfless love: a child's natural protector. In the wild, a mama bear is the ultimate fierce guardian. For those who grew up with this kind of loving, protective mother, it's hard to imagine what it's like being raised by someone so broken she leaves lasting scars.

Rayne Wolfe, author of "Toxic Mom Toolkit: Discovering a Happy Life Despite Toxic Parenting," is familiar with dreading Mother's Day. The run-up to the holiday can be crushing for those who grew up in an abusive family, she said.

"I was neglected. I was literally not fed. I was exposed to sexual abuse and abused by my mother's second husband," she said. Wolfe remembers trying to wake up her mother, passed out from drinking, as a child when she was hungry.

Her mother would ask to see her hands.

"If my hands weren't shaking, she wouldn't feed me," she said.

Making things worse, young victims tend to be ashamed of what they have experienced, and often hide their parent's abuse or neglect.

Mother's Day isn't the only holiday that can be a trigger point for emotional wreckage -- Valentine's Day is rough after a breakup, as is Christmas without a loved one.

But there's an added terribleness when even the premise of the holiday taunts you.

Mother's Day is a major commercial event, with total spending projected to reach $21.4 billion this year -- outpacing Valentine's Day by nearly a couple billion. The bombardment in store displays and advertisements is matched by the outpouring of social media tributes. Public adoration flows through our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram timelines all weekend. I enjoy publicly celebrating my own phenomenal mother, but the day is fraught for those who had to seek refuge from a mother, rather than turn to her for protection and support.

Wolfe, who said she went through a lot of therapy to understand what happened to her as a child, advocates self-protection: In some cases, it makes sense to limit, or even end, contact. Emotional abuse is just as traumatic as physical abuse.

When her mother was dying, a social worker from the hospital called Wolfe and suggested it might be time for her to "bury the hatchet."

Wolfe asked the social worker if she had ever met Wolfe's mother. She suggested spending some time with her, and then calling Wolfe back if she still believed she needed to be there.

"I never heard from her again," she said.

As an adult, she has nurtured an online community of those who have suffered from toxic relationships with their mothers. She asks them to start planning, six weeks out, what they will do on Mother's Day. She gives her readers permission to skip family events that leave them feeling worthless or sad. She encourages them to see their parent with adult eyes.

"It's disheartening when you are a good person, and you don't have a loving mother figure in your life," she said. Those who were not mothered can feel very isolated.

Fortunately for Wolfe, her father remarried when she was 16. She describes her stepmother, whom Wolfe cared for as she aged, as a beautiful and lovely person.

"There was a part of me that could never trust an older woman," she said. Her stepmother helped heal that part.

Proving that it takes a lot more than biology to be a mother.

Recently, I found myself with some extra time before a flight at the Detroit Metro Airport. I passed by one of those mini spa boutiques that offer chair massages and overpriced nail services. I paused to look around inside and gauge how indulgent I felt on this mini vacation.

Was I really going to spend twice as much to get a manicure than I would pay at home?

It was a quick mental calculation. Nah, I wouldn't.

While I was having this minor internal debate, I noticed the toes of a woman standing next to me. More specifically, the warm beige-pink color of her pedicure caught my eye.

"I love that color," I said, looking up and realizing I was probably talking to a model. She towered over me, was super-thin and had perfect skin and hair.

"Thanks," she said, adding that it was her favorite shade and she wore it all the time. She started looking through the display of polishes in front of us to see if she could find it for me.

Alas, they didn't stock OPI's Samoan Sand. Before I had a chance to make a note of the color in my phone, this stranger says to me, "You know, I have a bottle in my bag. Just take it."

What.

Did she really just offer me her favorite nail polish? I weakly objected, but I didn't walk away, or stop her from rummaging in her makeup bag. When she couldn't find it in her purse, she opened her carry-on luggage and looked through her clear bag of products.

Eureka. She held it out like a precious gift.

Humbled and a little embarrassed by her generosity, I opened my own cache of traveling essentials.

"Let's make it a trade," I said. "Take this blush. It's my favorite." (For those playing at home: MAC's Warm Soul.)

"Sure," she said. "I'll try it tonight."

We swapped cosmetics and walked out of the airport spa, each in opposite directions. We didn't exchange names or Twitter handles. Maybe we recognized a kindred spirit in one another that travelers sometimes stumble upon.

It reminded me of an incident on a flight 20 years ago.

I was flying from Houston to London, and was seated next to a British man also in his early 20s. We were in the last row and struck up a conversation. He was hilarious in that dry British way, and I was boisterously friendly in that Texas way. We laughed for much of that transatlantic flight, even after they dimmed the lights and the other passengers fell asleep.

He was launching a new product line in an elite hair salon in Los Angeles. I asked for recommendations for my hair, although as a graduate student I was too poor to afford such things. We parted ways, and I marveled at my good luck for having traveled with such an enjoyable seatmate.

A month later, back in the bitter winter of Chicago, a package arrived at my door. It was filled with dozens of hair products and a note from that stranger thanking me for the great conversation.

I probably sent a thank-you note or email, but we never communicated again after that exchange.

For years, I held onto those bottles of hair gel, styling cream and volumizer, probably worth a few hundred dollars. It was a tangible reminder of the kindness of strangers, of meaningful exchanges that might only last minutes or hours, of bonds forged in that limbo space of going from one place to the next.

When I told my children about this latest unexpected airport interaction, my daughter said it sounded like the kind of thing you see happen in movies.

It kind of felt that way, too.

I'll treasure this bottle of polish as much as that hair gel.

Cosmetic products that remind me of what's truly beautiful in life -- who you encounter on the journey.

It's a well-known parental habit to underestimate the trouble your own child gets into.

For some, it's always "other people's kids" who smoke, drink, do drugs or have sex. Turns out, little Johnny and Jane may not be the responsible digital citizens many parents believe them to be, either.

The Center for Cyber Safety and Education, based in Clearwater, Florida, commissioned a study last year that looked at how children in grades four through eight use the internet -- and how their parents perceive them to be using it.

Patrick Craven, director of the center, said the organization hired Shugoll Research to survey 192 students and their parents in four cities: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Baltimore and Bethesda, Maryland. While the sample size is too small to generalize to a national population, the results reveal a sizable disconnect in parents' perception and children's actual use of the internet.

Even in this relatively young subset, nearly half said they had used the internet at 11 p.m. or later on school nights, in ways other than doing homework. A third of the kids surveyed, and nearly half of the middle schoolers, said they had been on at midnight or later. Only 11 percent of parents perceived that their children were online that late at night.

That's just one parental blind spot the survey discovered.

About 3 in 10 students admitted they use the internet in ways their parents would not approve of. For the middle schoolers, this rose to 4 out of 10. What were the forbidden online activities they reported doing? Lying about their age to get onto adult websites, listening to or downloading music with adult content, watching movies or programs meant for adults, searching the internet for adult topics and using a webcam to Facetime with a stranger.

Four out of 10 children in the study said they had connected with a stranger online, and more than half of those kids told the stranger they were older than their real age.

When parents were asked if they thought their children were downloading and listening to music with adult content, 63 percent said yes. Actually, only 31 percent of students said they did this. The same was true for movies with adult content: Twice as many parents thought their children were watching them, compared to what children reported doing.

But when parents were asked if they thought their child had chatted with and tried to meet someone they'd met online, only 2 percent thought so. Fifteen percent of kids admitted they had.

"Parents are kind of missing the point," Craven said. This study wasn't even done with high schoolers, he said: We're talking about elementary and middle school-aged kids.

"The results prompted us to create all new materials for parents on our website," he said. The organization's site, safeandsecureonline.org, features a section for parents and guardians, which includes several suggestions:

-- Create a charging station: a spot where everyone's devices get plugged in at night. "You have to get (devices) out of the room," Craven said. Ninety percent of children said they had a device to access the internet in their room at night. Nearly 4 in 10 students said they had been really tired at school because of late-night internet use; a few arrived tardy or missed school due to it.

-- Consider apps or parental controls offered on family plans by wireless providers that allow parents to turn off the Wi-Fi connection in the house at certain times.

-- Make discussions about internet use an ongoing conversation, not a one-time thing. Nearly all children in the survey acknowledged that their parents or school had taught them about internet safety. But many parents have weak follow-through on rules and oversight.

-- Join the social media sites your children and their friends use. In this age group, the most popular ones were reportedly Instagram, Snapchat and Vine, with moderate numbers of kids also using Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Ask.fm. You don't have to be an active social media user, but being familiar with how the sites work and periodically checking in is a good idea. "If they know you are on, it will make an impact," Craven said.

-- Play your child's video games with him or her occasionally. Gaming these days has a social media aspect, and involves conversations with other people -- often strangers. While you may be good about picking games rated for your child's age, the in-game conversations with other players may not be age-appropriate.

There's a thin line between regularly talking about online use and lecturing or nagging. Tweens and teens are masters at tuning out the latter.

If this survey is any indication, these conversations require far better follow-through by parents.