2.6
March 30, 2021

Dear Mom: Thank You for Healing With Me.

Dear Mom,

I’m writing you a letter.

It’s maybe one you’ve never read before in these ways. Announced publicly to the world at large. But, maybe, mothers like you can relate. And, daughters like me can remember why we are here.

I want you to know how proud I am of you. I know that’s something you maybe don’t hear enough or didn’t hear as a young girl or even as a mother. I know the trauma you endured never felt “valid” enough.

I know the betrayal of your own feelings, your own knowing, your own felt experience never received the validation it needed to feel safe to be here. I know you had no choice but to protect your sensitivities as I did, too. That this world, our born-into families, didn’t know or have the capacity or navigational system to allow feelings to be our most trusted guide.

I know you had to abandon parts of you, parts of yourself to exist in this world. That you had to harden over your own feminine softness to feel like you belonged in this world, but not too much; you stood out. I know this world wasn’t made for sensitive feelers like us. And, I know you are one. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen and felt your heart. I’ve touched your heart and you’ve touched mine, even when I was walled up in my own pain, afraid to let love in.

I’m so sorry you had to endure your pain alone. I’m so sorry you felt you had to do it alone. I’m so sorry you felt like it was your cross to bear, like your trauma and pain were your fault. I too have felt those things.

As mother and daughter, we came into this world together. Boundary-less. Tied together. I from you, from your own body and womb. I became you. I grappled with these same things. I know now, we came to heal together.

I know not everyone gets that chance to heal forward and backward into time, across generations. I know this healing is a gift, even when I, too, feel it a cross to bear on my tired shoulders.

We stand four decades apart but closer than ever before. I know we have been enmeshed for so long, hard to separate your “stuff” from my own. A shared sense of dis-order in orderly chaos. That my dis-ease was your disease, that our genes lined up, paired chromosomes together of similarly-disordered manifestations of trauma.

We came here to heal together, but separately in our own ways and time. I get that now. I didn’t want to truly heal for a long time. Maybe, you didn’t either. Maybe, we both believed that the pain of self-betrayal and self-abandonment was worth it. That it was safer to feel the pain of the known than to feel the pain and uncertainty of the unknown.

We’ve taken the time we needed to get to where we are. I had to take my journey of healing, stumbling and fumbling along the way, trying this therapy, that healing center, this alternative medicine, and the next one. You had to take your own unique way, perhaps some light shined on these parts of both of us, allowing more possibility of healing for the other.

Maybe they call this codependence. Maybe we are and have been healing that too. What daughter is not codependent upon her mother for nourishment and life, though? In many ways, this is intrinsic and yet, separation can be made. To separate from the other is to give the other the chance, the power to choose healing for themselves.

And, I believe we have been doing that.

Mom, thank you for choosing to heal in your own time. For taking the path less traveled, for braving the felt experience of life, for stepping toe and foot into the water of the unknown. For choosing you this time. For answering the call of your own soul to heal in only the ways you can heal.

I am honored to be your daughter. I am honored to do this healing with you, for the feminine, for the family of our ancestral lineage and tribe. For us. For you. For me.

I know sometimes I don’t want to face the darkness of healing my wounds, of taking better care of my wounds. Sometimes, I do want to run far away from here, from this mission. Sometimes, I wish I could be a kid again and feel safe in your love, before the pain inflicted its mark on me.

I know our love is imperfect. Because we needed to learn more about unconditional love. Perhaps, that is what you’ve taught me, even in the imperfection of it all.

Mother, from whose womb I came, I know we came to teach each other how to heal, how to reclaim our own power.

Our lineage of grandmothers, great-grandmothers, women of fury, women of strength, women of softness, we can learn to be soft again. We can learn how to soften back into feeling, back into our bodies, back into our felt wisdom, back into our rhythms and cycles, our fluidity, our intuition, our being-ness, and know our worth is intrinsic, our value infinitely tied to no one and no thing.

We are here because of all those who came before us. What mark will we leave? What feeling will we imprint upon others? And, not from a place of self-sacrifice anymore. A place of holy reverence of our self as utmost priority and importance for care and nurturing love.

Mom, thank you for healing with me. Even though we took our own ways and now have crossed paths again, in a way, I know in my bones my healing is your healing and your healing is my own.

Call it enmeshment. I call it freedom. I call it divine agreement. I call it liberation for all the women before us and for the women after us. To know that our being-ness, our pureness of love, our depth of sensitivity was the exact medicine we needed to reclaim and to gift back to this world.

So that the world may know softness again. May know feeling again. May know that healing happens when we make space for love to be our guide again. A little more at a time.

Mom,

Thank you.

I love you.

Signed,

The Wild Daughter in You

~

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