Tag: healing

For most of my life, Mother’s Day belonged to her.

Not in the way it’s supposed to,  not because she’ earned it or shown up for it. Because she demanded it. The text would arrive, happy mothers day, like clockwork. Sometimes a gift, even. The performance of it. And I knew, every single year, exactly what that text was actually asking for. It wasn’t a greeting. It was a bill.

The resentment would start building before the day even got there. The dread of it. What do I do with this? Do I respond? Do I say it back? I’d find myself calculating, every May, how to navigate something I hadn’t asked to navigate. The holiday that’s supposed to be about mothers somehow always ended up being about managing her feelings while swallowing my own.

This is the woman who didn’t raise me. Who left me with someone else and got on with her life. Who made sure my father wasn’t in the picture either, so I had the full set , no parents, just a gap where the people who were supposed to show up weren’t. She was the gateway to this world and not much else, and there were years I tried to make that enough. Tried to find something to be grateful for in the basic fact of existing. Then I’d remember how hard the existing had been, and the math stopped working.

A few years back, when I started doing the actual work , therapy, reading, sitting with things I’d spent decades refusing to sit with , I started seeing the pattern clearly. And somewhere in that clarity I found enough ground to stand on to say the thing I’d never said.

I texted her. Told her I wouldn’t be acknowledging Mother’s Day with her anymore. That I was working on a lot of things and this was one of them. Kept it simple. Said what I meant.

She said she understood.

The following year she sent a gift and a happy mothers day text anyway.

Of course she did.

I stayed two more years after that. Kept trying. Kept hoping some version of her was in there that could actually show up. The hope was stubborn and not entirely rational but it was there and I didn’t choose it and you can’t just put it down because it’s inconvenient. Then came a favor she asked for. She asked four times. Each time I said no, clearly, without hedging. On the fourth time something in me just finished. Not dramatically. Quietly. Like a door closing all the way.

That was December.

This is the first Mother’s Day on the other side of that door.

I keep checking in with myself about the no contact decision the way you do when something is new and you’re not sure yet if it’s going to hold. Every time I check in I get the same answer, not a thought, a physical response. Something in my body that settles instead of bracing. That’s how I know it’s right. I’ve spent enough of my life bracing.

What the day is now: my son. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The circle I actually belong in, the one I actually built, the one where the showing up goes both ways. There’s no dread in it. No calculation. No managing someone else’s expectations around a day that was never really about me when she was in it.

She never deserved to be in that circle. It took me a long time to let myself know that. Longer to act on it.

But this one’s mine. Finally, actually mine.

That’s enough.