Grief As Altar – Day 8: Grieving Within Motherhood

Grief doesn’t wait for quiet moments. It threads itself through the everyday—like sitting in the passenger seat as a daughter learns to drive. This reflection holds the ache of parenting through loss, the beauty of growing alongside our children, and the way memory bends time when love and grief meet.

Transcript

I am at a pivotal point of being a mother as my daughter is starting driving lessons and I've been doing this series on grief. There's a part of me that's wondering if all of this is coming back up about parenting and grief because I am at that stage in my life where my children are getting older and more independent and it was also a time when I was 16 or 17 when I really stepped away from my parents when I was that age and if it's all circling back to grief you know there's so many things you go through as your kids grow up. I mean it comes at every stage when your child first walks or when your child first does something on their own or whatever it be throughout the years maybe your children go to school the time they go to school or they go to high school you know all of these are moments and they're grieving moments and I don't mean that in a negative way. It's like there's a new thing coming right and my daughter driving is not easy. It's becoming an adult and I think did I parent her well enough? Did I give her what she needs? I think back to my I've been talking to her a lot about when I was her age and what it was like when I was first driving and the first accident I got into and pop pop my dad to pop up to her how he taught me how to drive and it's bringing up all of these memories again back to those versions of myself in the past the version of me as a teenager and I've been grieving all of the things I went through. You might have heard me say in an earlier video that I went through a journey to allow my ancestors and my spirit team to hold with me everything that was hard in my life from my younger years and teen years were not easy and it's like I've been grieving how much I held back then just from her beginning to drive because the stories are beginning to connect and bend time it's turning to arc everything together and I'm going through it with her. Gosh no one prepares you for parenting through grief and grief can be little or big you know I want my parents to see these milestones of my kids and my dad would have loved to see my daughter begin to drive he would have been the first in the car he was probably looking forward to it from the moment she was born teaching someone else how to drive all these pieces of grief we can connect the dots and if we allow our body to connect the dots if we allow our hearts to connect the dots imagine how much we're healing I'm not only healing through the grief of well my daughter is getting older now she's going to be in a car driving herself in a year but I'm allowing myself to grieve myself as a parent I'm allowing myself to grieve this daughter a 17 year old daughter a 25 year old daughter so through these few actions I'm actually healing so many pieces of who I am and that that that is the gift of grief if you can start to connect the dots to bend the time to allow all the reflections in that prism yeah