On A Decade of Grief and Growth

My heart is tender this morning. This day in June, it marks ten years since the day my mother left us. My mother June. We sat with her on the couch while she took her last breaths, surrounding her in tender, unassuming love, a kind that she was never able to show us. I don’t know where our hearts gathered it from, as my sisters and auntie and I all filled with courage and love as we told her, “It’s ok mom, you can go rest. We love you, we are right here with you.” We had each served the role of mom to our mom at some point, and the three of us daughters, no older than 31 years, banded together to comfort and nurture our mother in a way that we had never experienced.

Ten years ago. We were released from the bondage of her mental illness. Her anxiety, her fear, that came out it anger and control. In words and actions that hurt and scared and baffled us. Three young girls craving the love of our mother, a woman who was so afraid of the world, she couldn’t leave her own home. She passed after a long deterioration, and when people ask us how, we have to say “I don’t know, she never went to the doctor, we can only guess.”

We can only guess at what caused her so much fear she couldn’t leave her home for over a decade.

We can only guess at what ate away at her body to the point of brokenness.

We can only guess at the stress and pain she experienced as a single mother to three young girls living in extreme poverty.

And we could only guess at where the journey out of those shackles would take us.

Grief is a strange thing. My therapist told me once that it never really goes away, it just changes as we go. It’s so true. There have been anniversaries in the past ten years that have been hard, especially the first two or three. There have been anniversaries that have come and gone and I didn’t even realize it was the day, and then grieved all over again because I had completely forgotten. This anniversary, number ten, a whole decade, has been a whole new experience. I spent the night dreaming of her death all over again. Only this time she was in the hospital, with all of the medical attention she could need, and still not making a difference. In my dream I was so angry. She had already died, why was I going through her death all over again? Our minds are strange and powerful and wonderful things. I had to go through it all over again, in a new and different way I believe, to understand that regardless of how it happened, it still happened, and all I have the control over is how I move forward.

I’ve built my last decade of life around healing the wounds of mental illness, poverty and toxic stress. I’ve become a wife, learning how to navigate a healthy relationship I’ve never been exposed to before. I’ve become a mother to two amazing tiny humans, who bring out the deeply embedded, generational patterns of dysfunction and illness in my archives. I’ve had to do the hard work to notice, learn, understand and change how I respond to the daily stresses of parenting. The stresses that come out even when life is amazing. Parenting is not an easy role, and without strong resilience it is far to easy to fall back into what we only subconsciously know and to pass down the cycles of family damage.

I’ve also spent a decade growing beauty out of the grief and pain. Growing a family, growing love, growing joy, growing me.

This anniversary, ten years, I feel, marks not the end of my grief, because it will always be there, but it does seem to close a door to the deep work of changing pain. Ten years opens the door to a new part of my life that doesn’t have to be built around the dark, but can really start to be built around the light. To, instead of focusing so hard on changing what went wrong, to start growing the resilience and joy of what is going right. To be First Generation Happy.

I love you Mom. Thank you for the opportunity to grow and change. May you be soaring in all of the light and love.

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