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My young adult children live physically far away from me.

I don’t see that as a problem.

I have stopped viewing spaces and physical distance in relationships as a “bad” thing.

Taking space in relationships has helped me find and fill out my own natural shape, breaking out of the assigned box in which I stuffed myself for most of my life as the good, people-pleasing girl I was taught to be.

I now see that when my young adult children go far away from home, it helps them find what their natural shape is. It’s an opportunity for them to try to liberate themselves from the roles they played in our family system in childhood, and to become who they really are when they are left to their own devices.

Because my children are far away, I cannot always solve problems for them as they arise, as I would be tempted to if they were near. As a result, I have had to learn to trust and allow space and time for them to find their own solutions.

My children had to learn to rely on their own creativity and resilience, to ask for and accept help from other people in their lives, and are building up confidence that they can take care of themselves and find solutions to their life challenges.

I find this is the biggest gift I can offer them as a mother: self-sufficiency and trusting in their abilities, as they learn to dance with life.

Unexpectedly, distance has also helped me to begin to open up in my relationships and express feelings I couldn’t when we were physically near.

One of my daughters was able to share with me secrets that were suffocating her life force and thus released some of her shame when we were physically apart. Some things are easier to express in writing.

I find that distance helps remove the transactional nature of co-habitation that tends to pollute our relationships, and allows for the essence of connectedness to be revealed.

As my children started leaving home, I trained myself to remain connected to them through my heart. I focus on opening my heart to the expansive feeling of love I feel for them, and it helps me feel connected to them even when we are far away.

I’ve had to pierce through layers of worried thoughts, facing my doubts and fears, in order to get to my heart. My heart is the gateway to trust that everything will work out for me and my children. As I lean in to trust, I shift my attention from worrying about all that can go wrong (as I did for most of my life) to learning to notice all that is already working out, and how many miracles are happening all the time for things to have worked out until now.

When I relinquish the illusion of control over my adult children’s lives, I give them access to their own power.

To relinquish control takes enormous effort and requires lots of rewiring, as it goes against everything I was taught about my role as a mother. It used to be so painful and frustrating to be physically far away, unable to swoop in and fix things and make everything better. What helped is knowing that I cannot save my children from life happening to them.

One of my daughters is currently going through a life crisis.

Once again, I’m confronted with my helplessness in the grand scheme of life.

Besides being there for emotional support, beaming love through my heart and the daily prayer asking to keep my babies safe, what more can I do? And even that gesture—the prayer—is an act of surrendering my control to a greater power.

After years of presiding in the sacred role of their safe-keeper when my children were living in my home, I release them back to life where they belong.

Each of my daughters came here for her own soul journey. It is so clear to me now that the traits they were born with, their karmic patterns, were visible from the beginning of their lives.
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And I am no longer surprised to observe how each twist and turn in their lives is taking them to places where they can either repeat or resolve the lessons their souls came here to work through.

This capacity for seeing life from a bird’s eye view does not diminish the very real pain and stress I feel in my body when I think of my daughter.

As a mother, I feel everything she is going through as if it were happening to me. But I remind myself that my stress, my discomfort is happening in my own body. And my somatic experience points me to my own wounds that this current situation triggers in me.

I mitigate my suffering when I remember that my human mind—mostly filled with survival fears—cannot comprehend nor calculate the immensity of life for which my children were born.

It is not my job to interfere in my young adult daughter’s life trajectory. Wrapping her in a gauze of protective padding against life will not serve her, but deprive her of the opportunity to access her own resilience.

Facing life’s invariable difficulties is what forces us to mine our own power, and teaches us to connect to our own wisdom, alchemized from learning our lessons and processing the pain of our wounds.

When I relinquish the illusion of control over my adult children’s lives, I am learning to live life in surrender to a greater universal intelligence. When it comes to sending my girls out into the world, I entrust their lives to the Great Mother, the same energy to which I entrust my own life.

If the last 10 years taught me anything, it is that even the most painful events that felt like the end, revealed themselves—with distance—as a portal to unimaginable and miraculous new beginnings.

The biggest truth I hope to instill in my daughters is that no matter the physical distance between us, we are connected through our hearts. My heart radiates love and protection toward them, and they just need to remember to remain open to receive.

All those new steps they are undertaking seemingly alone—they are never alone. The Great Mother is guiding them (just like She is guiding me) through trials and lessons and blessings, while I am learning to see the greater scheme of things rather than focusing merely on survival.

What has brought the most meaning to my role as a mother lately is teaching each of my daughters how to mother their own inner child. That means learning to listen to and identify their own needs, then honoring them by attending to them.

It’s a humbling process of re-parenting. As I learn all that this means for me, I can teach my daughters. As young adults, they are now responsible for their own inner child, becoming their own attentive and loving mother.

I am grateful for this clarity in the evolution of my role.

And although my heart still gets achy at times from the physical distance between us, and my eyes get wet, I know how to access peace, too. When I connect to the abundance in my heart, I get the sense of certainty and knowing, no matter how fleeting.

As a human mother, I cannot save my children from the full range of life.

Nor do I want to.

I hope they live it fully, taking huge gulps of it, seizing opportunities, loving unabashedly, daring greatly.

I teach my daughters—young women—how to connect to their own wisdom. It’ll serve them well.

That, and learning to connect to me through their heart, no matter where we each are geographically, will also keep us connected beyond my physical existence.

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