The Relationship We Couldn’t Have, Until We Could...What Didn’t End When My Mother Died

There are dates that arrive quietly and still carry a lifetime within them.

May 4 is one of those days for me.

It is the anniversary of my mother’s passing into the afterlife.
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For a long time, I did not know how to hold this day. Not because I did not love her, but because our relationship was complicated in ways that did not fit into simple words.

My mother struggled.

What I understand now, but did not then, is that she was carrying more than I could see as a child. Pain that had been with her long before I was born.  
Also, postpartum depression was not something people spoke about in the late '60s and early '70s. It was not named, not supported, and often hidden beneath a quiet but heavy sense of shame.

She lived with that, and I grew up inside of it.

​There were other struggles too. Emotional instability. Bipolar patterns. Ways of coping that brought both relief and harm. She was raising me on her own, doing the best she could with what she had.

And at the same time, I was a child trying to make sense of a world that often did not feel steady or safe.

Both of those truths exist.

For many years, I carried anger. Not just surface frustration, but deeper questions that did not seem to have answers.
Why was it like this?
Why could she not be what I needed?
Why did it have to feel this way?
Those questions stayed with me long after she passed.

For a time after my mother passed, I did not know how to be with the grief. I had never experienced anything so profound, and I did not have the tools to navigate it in a way that supported me.

I tried to outrun it. I numbed it. I lost myself for a while in ways that only created more distance from what I was actually feeling.

There came a moment, several years later, when I found myself at a breaking point. Sitting alone, I could no longer avoid what I had been carrying.  I've come to call this "the edge of despair."
And in that moment, something within me responded. Not loudly, but clearly enough that I could feel a shift.

It was the beginning of a different direction. Not only in my life, but in my relationship with my mother.
Through my own willingness to face what I had experienced, and to feel what I had been holding, I began to meet her in a different way.

Not as the mother I needed her to be.
But as the woman she was.
And eventually, as the soul she is.

This did not happen by dismissing anything. It happened because I allowed myself to stay with the truth of what I had lived.
The anger.
The grief.
The unmet needs.

As I stayed with that, something began to soften.
Over time, my experience of her changed.

Today, my mother shows up in a way I never could have imagined when she was alive. There is wisdom. There is love. There is a sense of lightness and even joy that was not always accessible to her here.

And perhaps most meaningful of all, there is relationship.
Not perfect.
Not rewritten.
But real in a new way.

I share this today not to redefine what was, but to honor what has become possible.
Change does not always require the other person to be different. Sometimes it asks us to be willing to meet the truth of what we experienced and allow something new to emerge from there.
Even across the threshold of life and death.

If you carry a complicated relationship with someone who is no longer here, I want you to know this.
There are still ways to tend that connection.
There are still ways to find peace.
There are still ways for something meaningful to unfold.
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Today, I honor my mother. Her life, her struggles, and the path that continues between us.
And I honor the work and the willingness it has taken to meet her there.

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