Lauren was so grateful and happy that Aria was thriving,
That Nathan and Nico were in a solid,
Connected place,
That her relationship with Nico felt loving on a foundation she could trust.
To her surprise,
Nathan was friendly with true warmth exchanged whenever they spent time together.
In their own unique way,
They had become their own version of family,
All caring for Adriana and sharing in the moments of connection as she grew.
She looked over at Nico and Adriana.
She was sitting in her high chair and Nico handed her a strawberry,
Juice spilling down her chin.
Lauren laughed as she wiped her daughter's face.
And when she looked up and caught Nico's eyes,
He said with such tenderness,
I'm so happy.
It's moments like this that make me wish I could stop time.
Everything was going so well and she wanted to be sure she could sustain all that good.
It was admittedly very new to her.
Lauren committed to continuing attending Family Constellation workshops every couple of months.
She wanted to hold on to and learn how to sustain all this good,
Continuing to bring awareness to all that she'd been living through made the foundation of her new life feel more solid,
Something she could confidently build upon.
With each workshop she attended,
She felt pieces of herself fall back into place,
A sense of feeling just a little more free,
More connected with herself,
A little less bound to the issues with her mom.
The missing pieces of her dad,
Less haunted by her grandmother's grief.
The heaviness within her loosened its grip.
She could feel it in her body.
Her shoulders didn't grip the way they used to.
Her breath didn't stay halfway down her chest.
One afternoon,
The facilitator asked her about a grandfather she never knew,
The one who had died of cancer before she was born.
The only thing she knew were stories and whispers,
So Lauren hesitated.
She had never considered how his absence had rippled down through the family.
The facilitator simply asked her to place a chair in the circle for him.
And in that quiet act,
Something stirred.
Margaret,
Her mom,
Had only been three when her dad died,
A little girl who should have been climbing up in her dad's lap,
Asking him to help her tie her shoes,
Cuddling up to read stories.
Instead,
She lost him before she ever had the words to name the loss.
Her grandmother was buried in grief,
Unable to function,
Unable to parent.
So Margaret grew up with a lot of time alone in her room,
Waiting for someone who never came.
She learned to swallow her cries,
To hold her face still,
To lock her feelings deep inside because there was no one there to meet them.
As Lauren stood in the circle,
Looking at the chair meant to hold her grandfather,
And she felt that absence,
Not just his,
But her mother's too.
She saw how the silence her mom carried wasn't cruelty,
It was all she knew.
That little girl,
Left to raise herself in a house smothered by grief,
Had simply shut down because it's the only way to stay,
The only way to move from one day to the next.
A few days later,
Lauren drove to see her mom again.
This time,
She didn't go with the weight of expectations.
She went with curiosity,
Softened by the small shifts that had been happening inside of her since becoming a mom herself.
Over tea at the kitchen,
Lauren asked the question she never dared,
What was it like for you as a little girl?
Her mom didn't answer right away.
She stared down at her chipped nail polish,
At the hands that had carried far too much for far too long.
Then,
Almost by accident,
She offered a detail,
Just one,
How she walked herself to school in the snow,
How her mother never came to the door to wave goodbye.
It wasn't much,
It wasn't a big story,
There wasn't a hug or an apology,
But it was a crack in the armor,
The smallest glimpse of the child her mom had once been.
Something shifted in Lauren again,
An acceptance that even if her relationship with her mom remained distant,
There was now an understanding that people who can't give us what we need often do that because they carry their own unfinished stories,
Their own unspoken pain.
When Aria woke up from her nap,
Lauren scooped her up and placed her in her mom's arms.
She watched her mother's eyes soften in the way that only grandmother's eyes do,
Spilling out tenderness that had never quite reached Lauren.
It hurt that she hadn't known that softness before,
But it also healed something deep inside of her too.
In that messy,
Impossible bothness,
Grief and understanding all at once,
Lauren let herself rest.
