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Let's do a mini-Mother's Day thread: When Charles Schulz got drafted in WWII, his mother was dying of cancer. He never saw her again. Mother's Day in Peanuts is often a sad occasion, none more so than this autobiographical strip. 
2) In the 70s and 80s, it was often Woodstock who was looking for his mother on this day. In keeping with the sadness of this day in Peanuts, he not only never found her, but often ended up heartbroken.
3) A recurring trope was for Woodstock to sit at the top of a hill with a flower in his hands in the hope that his mother would fly by. Much like how the Great Pumpkin never comes, his mother is nowhere to be found.
4) Mothers are absent in Peanuts in general. Charlie Brown talks of his father but rarely his mother. Peppermint Patty's mother died when she was a child and she's raised by her father. Here's a poignant strip of her on Mother's Day.
5) Snoopy, too, doesn't know his mother but tries to find her at various points. Once, Schulz did a long series on Snoopy just wandering the country trying to locate her. She's nowhere to be found.
6) There is humor in these strips--as in the last two panels--but at its core it's about loss and wandering in the rain looking for a mother who will never return.
7) Of course, the Peanuts characters find family among themselves. Snoopy does seem like a parental figure for Woodstock, but as these strips make clear, he can't replace the absence of a mother.
8) What can you say? Just look at how deeply sad a strip like this one is.
9) The punchline, if you want to call it that, of the entire series where Snoopy wanders the country in search of his mother is just, "Mom?"
10) OK, I'll conclude here. I don't think you can separate the absence of mothers in Peanuts from how Schulz lost his own mother, a loss that came just as he was shipping out to war. Mothers are searched for in Peanuts, but never found.
Bumping this thread for lunch because I teared up a little while compiling it and now can't stop thinking about it.
PS: Anyone interested in learning more about this topic should pick up David Michaelis's "Schulz and Peanuts." It opens with Schulz being shipped off to war and his dying mother telling him, "Well, good-bye, Sparky. We'll probably never see each other again."
