The one way she knew how to love me
There was a time when my body stopped me completely. Not gently. Not in a way I could ignore.
I couldn’t get out of bed. I wasn’t present with my husband or my kids. It was frightening in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
At the time, I called it burnout and it was, but looking back now, I can see it was also the first time something much older surfaced.
It was the first time I really grieved my mum.
We had a complicated relationship growing up. There were a lot of things that weren’t easy between us. Many of which we never got to discuss before she died.
I will make it clear before I explain, that my mum wasn’t a demon. As an adult I can really appreciate that she tried her best after having been dealt her own shitty hand as a kid. After a ton of work, I am finally at a place where I can both love her dearly and also accept that she fell far short of what I needed as a child.
That said, when I was sick, everything changed. She would sit with me and she wouldn’t leave and being unwell was the time when I could most feel her presence. That kind of care.
Lying there, years later, unable to move, something in me remembered. Not consciously at first. Just a feeling, a familiarity in being stopped and a sense of being allowed to not hold everything together.
It made me realise something I hadn’t seen before. There was a part of me that only knew how to receive that kind of care when I was unwell. It was a gut punch like no other and so much began to make sense.
I wonder how many of us are living with something similar? Not necessarily in the same way?
Where slowing down isn’t something we allow ourselves, unless something forces us. Where being held, supported, or fully seen only feels available when something is wrong.
So we keep going, we stay capable, hold everything together and we don’t realise what it takes for us to finally stop.
I’m not downplaying illness. That’s real, but I am beginning to wonder whether sometimes our bodies are asking for something we haven’t known how to give ourselves. Something we only allow when we have no other choice, because we live in a world that rewards us for holding it together.
No one tells us what it costs.
No one tells us that the stopping, the frightening, unwanted, forced stopping, might also be the first honest thing our body has done in a long time.
So this week, just notice.
When do you allow yourself to truly stop?
What has to happen for that to feel allowed?
You don’t have to change anything. Just begin by seeing it.
There’s a layer underneath this that I’ve only shared in the paid piece this week. About my mum. About what our complicated relationship taught me about what I believed I was allowed to need. If you want to go a little deeper it’s there.