Dear Lizzy,
Two years ago my mother died from cancer. I feel honored to have been her primary caretaker for the last year of her life and know my mother was a phenomenal woman. and we also had a long hard period in my late 20s when I felt a lot of anger and disappointment and shame about her and her choices. a lot of those conversations i imagined having – healing and ‘getting it all out’ with hugs and tears – of course can no longer happen living human to living human. and so i am here with my grief and missing and working through forgiving myself and her and …
Any advice for this process of forgiveness?
Dearest Halley,
Your question makes me think of the old oak tree that sits sweetly next to the back porch of the Love, Lizzy Farm – where the original Lizzy, reincarnated as a beautiful red cardinal, now resides. When pondering a response to you, I thought about the strength of that oak tree. How out of her tall thick trunk are hundreds of weighted reaching branches. At each turn of a new year, I can see how much the branches have extended and grown, and I bear witness to the leaves falling and the oak tree stoically allowing the shedding process to occur.
She reminds me so much of a mother.
I often wonder how it feels to have to be that strong oak tree, to know that each day, even if you are tired, hot from the sun, parched from a drought, losing parts of yourself to the winds of fall, that the caretaking of the branches, and all the wildlife that lives between the shadows of your leaves, is still your responsibility.
Considering your mother as that resilient oak tree, I imagine how she must have navigated her own pain, grief, internal battles, identity shifts, body changes, and heartaches while still attempting to remain strong for you. What must she have experienced in those moments when she realized she was falling short, letting you down, or not capable at times of holding everything together?
I can recall my own journey back through my memories to understand my mother better after she was gone. I am going to suggest a similar process to you if you feel so called. About twelve years after her death, in my thirties, I found myself alone, resentful and confused about some of her decisions. My feelings toward my mother were conflicted. Was anger warranted? Was it childish to indulge in resentment? How spoiled and ungrateful to harbor these feelings toward my mother who fought cancer so bravely and is no longer here to explain herself…yet the sensations of frustration and abandonment persisted.
I embarked on an internal family systems journey where I decided to revisit some of the moments where my resentment of her began. Taking a deep breath and closing my eyes, I recalled my younger self somewhere around 1995, at the dinner table, too small for her chair. There, I experienced that desperate sadness – that yearning for my mom to somehow shift certain family dynamics, to take control of difficult situations and reduce the occurrences of what seemed like very awful interactions.
As my thirty-something self observed my mother – a woman raising three little girls, working to help provide for the family, loving her husband and wanting to support him – a different version of the story emerged. One where possibly my mother keeping herself quiet and small was her way of handling the situation. I imagined myself as her. I felt the tension she must have felt. My heart beat with her heart as I tried to imagine what she was feeling and thinking. In my own heart I felt an ache and understanding. In that moment, most if not all of my anger subsided.
Those late night conversations my mom may have had to improve our family situation remain unknown to me. I’ll never be able to ask what attempts she made to course correct or change things. But after my journey back, I have a lot more compassion for her and her situation. I am able to see the complexity of those moments and her place as a woman in society at that time.
Perhaps similar “remote viewing” might benefit you from your current perspective.
Self forgiveness, well the same rules apply. There was one time in my teens where I really felt like I let my mother down. My mom saved up her extra dollars in a jar to help fund my choir trip to New York City. On one of the days, I separated from her as my chaperone to go with a different group of girls. While I was out galavanting and shopping or doing whatever eighteen-year-old girls do, my mother fell. Having endured a hip replacement where cancer had eroded her bone, walking was already difficult for her. She was deep into her cancer journey with only a few years left to live. I will never forget what it felt like to return to the meeting point and have my teacher’s husband walk toward me to tell me the news that my mother had fallen. All color drained from my face, all justifications I had created for leaving her evaporated, replaced by an overwhelming heaviness of shame in my chest.
The opportunity to properly apologize to my mom never came – to express my remorse that she was alone when injured, that I wasn’t there to help her. Even today, strong emotions surface when recalling that time – the selfishness I demonstrated, the sadness that my ailing mom had made such efforts to join this trip with me, and I chose to leave her side.
We all aspire to be our best for loved ones and want them to be their best for us. Yet the reality remains – we are human and flawed. We offer what we can, and sometimes what we later recognize as our worst efforts, we once believed were our best.
After nearly 17 years since losing my mom, I’ve come to understand that she remains accessible in any moment; the early years of laughter and play, those youthful moments I wish I could rewrite, and even now when I especially long for her wisdom. When I quiet my thinking brain, step into nature and open my heart to hers, she appears– sometimes in the wrinkles of my own hands. the dependable morning song of the cherry red cardinal, and in the eyes of my daring nieces.
But remember, you are the beautiful sprawling extension of your mother, my dear. You are the wildlife that plays within the shadows of the leaves of your mother’s strength, jumping from branch to branch courageously while she stands tall holding things steady. And that is what she desires you to do. Your younger self’s need to view your mother as “other” in order to establish your own place in the world follows the natural circle of life. Had you not recognized her decisions or choices as missteps, you might have unwittingly continued her cycles–the very patterns I suspect she desperately wanted to end before they affected you.
I encourage you to maybe spend time under an old oak tree rewiring some of these memories you have of you and her and applying some compassion and understanding to you both. I have a strong feeling that your mother isn’t floating out there thinking about all the times you failed her or let her down, she might even be wishing she could talk with you about the trials and tribulations that led her to not show up for you as she wished. Mostly, I think she longs to hug you, to make you laugh, and to hold everything steady so the weight you carry on your branches can be lightened by the strength of her long, sturdy, center holding you both up. Perhaps in your time traveling adventure you will discover some lessons she has been waiting to teach you, and together you will both find peace and healing.
With all my love,
Lizzy
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