I wasn't sure how I would feel.
My first birthday with no contact with my mother. I knew it would be different. I didn't know exactly what different would feel like until I was inside it.
It's complex, the way everything involving her has always been complex. What I didn't expect was to feel a sadness for her. Not for what she did or didn't do. For what will never be. For how she will never understand why this happened or what it cost.
And yet alongside that sadness was something else. A space. A quiet happiness that wasn't fully there before because other things were taking up the room.
I reflected on whether this was still the right decision. The answer came not from my head but from my body. An overwhelming yes. She proved more than enough times that she would not respect my boundaries or me. And so I made the only choice I had left to make.
I look at this as an act of love for myself.
This next chapter opens with closing the door on things and people that weren't for my highest good. Learning to look inward for all of the things that were never provided. The validation. The witnessing. The simple experience of being seen and loved without conditions attached.
Today three family members reached out. All of it surface. Polite. Careful. And in that I could feel and see the distance, not just from them but from who I used to be in relation to them. How they have responded to my boundaries says everything about where they are in their own lives.
Things have changed. This next phase is not one where they will play a big role anymore. And that is okay. More than okay. To me that means a lot of healing has taken place.
I'm not blind enough to think the work is done. It never ends. But today I can sit here and feel proud of myself. Proud of the work I am doing to heal and to be more true to myself.