How to heal your mother wound.
I love my mom.
We had a rough go of it for the first 33 years of my life. We saw eye to eye on very little and generally didn’t understand one another. I felt like she didn’t know who I was and didn’t care. She felt I was inaccessible (I was). We would go through periods of shunning one another and disconnecting, and the general theme of our adult relationship was tolerance. That tolerance was mostly achieved through avoidance.
I just got off a three hour FaceTime call with her. I had a three hour call with her last week too. On those calls we laughed, cried, she told me stories of my great great grandparents and shared with me with why she voted for Trump (and I listened with genuine curiosity!), we laughed at the nuisances of our shared psychic abilities and she sent me pictures of some piano music I wanted to learn that, turns out, she had been working on just this week, and was the piece she walked down the aisle to when she married my dad. We bonded over how strong our intuitive connection is getting, that I know she’s texting me before she does, and she can feel me thinking about her before I reach out. We dug through each other’s human design charts today, connecting about how similar she and I are, after all.
Years ago I think our conversations totaled three hours a year and the fastest way to trigger me would’ve been to tell me I was just like her.
I spent years being resentful, spiteful, and rejecting toward her. I blamed her for much of my often painful childhood experience. I thought she needed to change to fit my idea of what a good mother should look like. She wasn’t interested in being anyone other than herself and I resented her for that, too.
Today I see significantly more similarities between us than differences. Today I see aspects of my mom *and myself* that I spent the greater portion of my life being totally blind to.
So what changed?
I did.
The first step I made was about on par with a first step in addiction recovery work: I admitted that my life had become unmanageable. I admitted that I was no longer willing to live in the constant shroud of resentment I felt toward her. I committed to doing everything in my power to repair our relationship without expecting her to change a thing. I even called her and told her that was my intention, which was, at the time, a very short and awkward conversation for both of us.
It went something like this:
Me: “Hi mom. I’m calling to tell you that I’m committed to repairing our relationship.”
Mom: “Okay? What does that mean?”
Me: “I don’t know yet. But I’m committed to doing whatever it takes.”
Mom: ...silence...and then, ”okay.”
Me: “Okay I’ll talk to you later.”
I had no idea what I was doing. She had no idea what I was doing, and god bless her, she showed up anyway.
And so I took one step at a time.
After a year of me working heavily on my own belief systems, emotional intelligence, and dysregulated nervous system, we had a call where we agreed on ways that we wanted to relate to one another going forward.
The next year we had our first three hour conversation in over a decade. We both cried for most of it. It was the first time I felt her love in years and the first time I told her I loved her and genuinely felt it.
It was like we could both finally relax. I let her be my mom and she let me be her daughter. I let her be Christy and she let me be Antesa. We both finally got to embody who we had always been. Together.
I don’t take all the credit for the quality of our relationship today, even though I’m well aware of the work I did to get here. She showed up too, following my lead, and together we have created something that has far exceeded any expectation I could’ve generated in my mind.
I learned a powerful lesson in this work I did with my mom that I apply almost everywhere else in my life now:
Separation is an illusion. If you cannot see yourself in others: look deeper. ❤️