Slowly, I’m losing my mother
image by Kristin Celestina
PART 1
I created this video on Instagram, and it was the first time I spoke openly about anything concerning my mom.
The caption is:
Slowly, I’m losing my mother.
No relationship in my life is as complex or nuanced as with my mother. Much of my life I have missed her love because she showed it differently than I wanted & needed.
But disease has shifted my lens, and I can see her love more clearly now.
This kind of love
is changing my life.
After sharing, I felt an immediate wash of love for the ability to create in the face of pain, regardless of the outcome. But I also felt a little freed - as if I’d let out a big secret I’d been keeping. When’s the right time to publicly share that your mom is not well?
What I wasn’t expecting was the outpouring of love and support from so many (including both Glennon Doyle and Cheryl Strayed(!!). I do it for a living, but even I forget the power of telling your story. What an incredible thing to feel held and seen in the social space.
My mother’s diagnosis coincided with discovering I was pregnant. So it’s been a winding journey of learning to let go of my mother, while becoming a mother myself. And at times it has felt so isolating. There is a grieving process I believe we will all go through in some way, some day for our mothers. For who she was, who she wasn’t, and who we might’ve wished her to be.
Despite the circumstances, I’m deeply grateful I can wade through the murk of grief while she’s still here. Because emerging from my own healing and my own discovery of self love, is a love for her, and empathy for her that I think she’s needed her whole life. The daughter becomes the mother and returns love to mother her own.
All this to say — while I know we all suffer, it reminds me we don’t do it alone. And I do hope, that this is only the beginning of a continued conversation we share of the mother/daughter experience.