You’ve celebrated—or survived—another Mother’s Day. Whatever the day held, your experience of Mother’s Day was unique. It was yours, and yours alone. But the question I want to ask on this week after Mother’s Day is universal. Now that you’ve had your experience of Mother’s Day, how did you mother yourself?

Were you kind and compassionate and accepting of whatever you did, and call it good? Or were you critical and judgmental and disparaging about that day? Perhaps you were somewhere in the middle between compassionate and judgmental. Perhaps your inner “jury” is still out and you’re not sure how you feel about yourself just yet.

Whatever you’re feeling, stop a minute and think of three words that describe your attitude toward yourself on Mother’s Day. Just three. Now apply those three words to your own mother. Do those words describe how your mother parented you? There’s a good chance they do describe her, because we do what we know. Are those kind words of patience, or are they critical? If those words are troubling and you’d like to change the words, you can. You’ve already started editing the script you grew up on simply by noticing how you talk to yourself.

Noticing how you speak with yourself means you can make better choices about that. You can start parenting yourself in ways that nurture, uplift, and support you.

Our mothers did a good enough job to get us old enough to make our own choices. And even though we cannot go back and change the childhood that we had, we can remake the way we tend to ourselves, nurture ourselves, mother ourselves today. The little child we were back then is still inside us. And how we talk to that little girl part of ourselves makes a difference today.

In fact, it can make all the difference.

It's never too late for a happy childhood. Here are tips on how to do just that.