Today would’ve been my mom‘s birthday.

My mother and I didn’t have the closest relationship or the most understanding one. Mostly we were like oil and water.

I had years of resentment towards my mom when my parents divorced. I was only in third grade at the time.

As I got older my mom never approved of my choices, especially when it came to boys. She carried a lot of hurt from her divorce. And in her mind men were not to be trusted.

I spent years working my way up in the television industry which means moving jobs every couple years in order to work in larger markets. My mom viewed this as major indecision and my inability to keep any kind of decent employment.

My mom viewed me as very antagonistic and negative. When my marriage failed, I believe in my heart she sided with my ex-husband, at least until I became brutally honest with her about the abuse going on.

She dearly loved my children, they were bright shining stars in her eyes, so much so that it almost gave me the impression that she loved them more than me.

As years went on my mom‘s softened and I definitely softened. I began to get a wider view, a higher perspective on all the pain that she held since childhood. I saw the wounded woman in her eyes, the housewife that was cheated on, the daughter that was always treated lesser than the son, the challenges she faced in coming out of a long-term marriage and moving into the workforce. And as I raised my children I could see the challenges that she must’ve faced in raising her own children.

The last couple years of her life I went into therapy for postpartum depression. I gained the insight that she too suffered from this affliction after I was born and was never treated.

The last year of her life was very rough on her, she had surgery and went into a surgical depression, it’s a real thing that I never knew about until then. It took her deep into a dark place that she never recovered from. Finally her heart just gave up.

I am grateful for the work that I did in those years leading up to her death otherwise I may have held onto more trauma than I actually had after her passing. For a while I blamed myself for not being by her side that Thanksgiving weekend that she passed. But with a couple more years of talk therapy and shifting my mindset and seeing the broader perspective, or I should say “feeling” that broader perspective, it enabled me to release that entanglement with love and forgiveness.

It’s been 20 years since she moved on. Since then my mother has shown up a few times in my dreams.

She shows me that she is much happier now than she was on this earthly plane. Her pain is gone and she can be a whole and complete soul again.

Sending you love, mom. You did the very best you could with what you had to work with in this lifetime.

I love you.