This year I spent a few days before Mother’s Day in Florida with my boys. We are trying to make it a yearly thing since we no longer live so close to one another. The time we spend together is short, so we are forced to make it count. There is no room for not making every moment matter – even the moments of silence and just being together. We are forced to be present and take it all in, something I don’t think we did when just moving along through life. We took certain things for granted – we all took being young for granted. Now we talk about where we were and where we are going. We talk about plans for the future, and in doing so, we are slowly healing from our past – together.
My mom hat will never go away, but learning to be a mom of adult children is a new challenge for me and another part of the healing process. I am learning to let go of the need to control. My oldest son put it to me the best when he said that I have to trust that I did my job as a mom and raised good men. Now my place is to let go and let it unfold as it should. I walked away from our conversation, knowing that adult children don’t need a helicopter mom, adult children need to know that we have trust in them. They must know that we have faith in them to be who they are and do the right thing. They need that trust and faith from us so they can have that faith and trust in themselves.
This isn’t an easy thing to do when you already thought you let go of so much control already. I always joke that nobody told us how hard it would be to make the flip of your kids growing up and no longer needing you. Yes, they need you, but not in the same way they did when they were young – and definitely not in the same way they needed you through chaos. Once healing begins you have to consciously let go of trying to micromanage everything for safety, for peace, or to minimize fallout. Once healing happens you have to let go of those reigns and let normal living in. That is sometimes hard to make that change of perspective because you don’t really have a gauge of what normal living is. This is a new concept for us and finding our new normal free of drama is something we are all working on together.
My trip was an eye opener that not only am I getting older, but our family dynamic is changing. We have turned a page moving into a future that is completely unknown to us. But a few mornings over coffee we realized that this is the most control any of us has ever had over our own lives. Each of us is choosing a path for themselves that is their own choice and exactly where they want it to go. Maybe we are able to do that because we have been through so much healing. We know to stay out of it and just be each other’s support system. We are no longer codependently intertwined, but in a healthy place as individuals, and it’s a very nice place to be.
I may not have been the best mom, but I know in spite of everything, through it all I was a good mom. I’m sure I can speak for many of us when I say that we did the best with what we had and the information we had available to us at that moment in time. Once knowledge and information are presented to us then healing becomes a choice. You choose to heal or you choose to stay the same. I always say that once you make that choice to heal then everyone else starts to follow your lead and they slowly begin to heal too. The ones that choose not to heal, then they move on with their own journey. We learn to detach in love. We can only control how we show up – it is not our job to control how others show up. Even when you’re a mom.
In love and light,
Fran
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