In 2021, the year that my first book came out, my mom was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
“I want to buy my mom a house”, was one of the first things that came out of my mouth when my art started to grow online. I could finally take care of her, I thought.
But life doesn’t always work that way. Sickness happens, and the power we often feel we have over life —it slips through our fingers, even when we have all the resources we have been told we need to keep us “safe” from it.
I wanted my mom to heal and see what I saw in her, a woman who has always had the odds stacked up against her, yet she still managed to raise us knowing how deeply loved and worthy we are. While my teen years were complex and hard on our relationship -- a messy divorce where she lost her identity tied in with my mental health struggles that she didn’t have the tools to cope with, left us needing to reconnect and mend our relationship as I moved into my early 20’s. Yet, even during our challenging years, my moms love and support for me never left me, nor my mind.
I am here, today, writing, drawing, creating, because of my mom. She never doubted me and never let me stay in self-doubt for too long.
My mom has always been a maker, making art in various forms has always been her love language with herself and the world around her.
My mom makes, just to make. Just to get her hands dirty in the experience and joy it brings her.
I never intentionally sought out to be an artist because of my mom, but now when I look back I can see it clearly — we carry the dreams of those before us in our bones the same way we carry their trauma. It doesn’t make it “set in stone”, but if you hold us up to the light you will see within us little ribbons of it all wrapped in us. It is part of the fiber of who we are.
It took me years to accept that while I wanted to find all the ways to completely heal my mom, to fix what her generation and trauma has woven into her — the only true way I could was to find the ribbons in me and work on healing them.
To believe I can be a successful artist, maker and a liberated woman.
We must grab the baton and run at full speed towards ourselves, and like them, towards the next generation.
That is how we heal them; by healing us.
The beauty of what they built for us, with the heartbreak that they don’t get to experience it the same way we do.
This is to the women handing us the baton and believing that we can run with it.
The yes/and of it all. Right in the middle is where the magic lives.
As some of you may know, I run a course called Step Into Your Magic, and we have a week where we focus on self-mothering…
Here are the journal prompts from the course which are ones I used to work through my own mother wound…
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