10/05/2026
🍃 A very personal reflection from my heart today 🤍
Mother’s Day feels very different for me this year.
A lot of people don’t know that my mum passed away eight weeks ago, and today feels like the right day to finally share a little piece of that journey, not from a place of blame or victimhood, but from a place of deep understanding, healing, grief, compassion, and love.
Growing up, my relationship with my mum always felt emotionally distant and hard to fully reach. There was love there, I know there was, but there was also a deep sadness around her for most of my life, almost like she was carrying something so heavy internally that it kept her slightly disconnected from herself, from life, and sometimes from the people around her too. Looking back now as an adult, and especially after everything I have learnt through my own healing journey, I truly believe she carried enormous trauma from her childhood and likely suffered postnatal depression that never fully left her. She spent a lot of time in bed when we were children, and I remember being a little girl standing there looking at her, wondering why she was so sad when us kids loved her so much.
For a very long time, I carried that sadness inside myself without even realising it.
I spent so much of my younger life trying to be enough for her. Trying to impress her, trying to make her proud, trying to feel fully chosen, fully loved, fully seen. And I think so many of us do this without even understanding we are doing it. We spend years desperately trying to receive love from people who simply do not have the emotional capacity to love us in the way we long for, while at the very same time overlooking the people already standing quietly in front of us, loving us deeply in the ways they can.
It has taken me many years to truly understand that.
Especially through my 40s, after doing so much healing on myself, my inner child, my nervous system, my body, my emotions, and the pain I had carried for most of my life, something slowly started shifting between Mum and I. We began having conversations that lasted for hours and hours, the kind of conversations that move beyond surface level life and into something much deeper. We spoke about pain, healing, trauma, soul lessons, and why certain things happen the way they do. Mum was very spiritual in her own way, and although she remained deeply stuck in certain hurts and anger throughout her life, there was also a part of her that understood the deeper soul side of being human. She understood that souls come here to experience lessons, challenges, contracts, growth, and healing through one another.
Over time, I stopped needing her to become someone different for me.
Instead, I began seeing her as a soul who had also experienced enormous pain during her human life.
A few days before she passed, I spent about four hours alone with her in the hospital, and honestly, that time felt incredibly sacred to me because throughout most of my life there was always somebody around. Family, children, distractions, noise. But this time it was just us.
She was heavily sedated under morphine by then, but I sat with her quietly and gave her a healing. I sent her forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and so much love. I thanked her for every lesson we had learnt together in this lifetime, even the painful ones, because somehow I could finally see the purpose within all of it.
And strangely, despite everything, it felt beautiful.
By that stage, I already felt as though her soul had started leaving her body days earlier. Anyone who has sat beside somebody transitioning will probably understand what I mean when I say that there comes a moment where you can feel the soul beginning to loosen itself from the physical body.
But one moment during that week will stay in my heart forever.
When I first walked into her hospital room after she had been transferred there, I had already been told she probably would not recognise me anymore. But the second she saw me, her whole face lit up. She opened her arms out to me and hugged me so tightly.
My mum was never somebody who constantly hugged me or openly expressed love throughout my life, so that moment meant more to me than words could ever properly explain. And as I held her, I got to tell her how deeply I loved her too.
There was something incredibly healing in that moment for both of us.
But today, on Mother’s Day, something shifted again.
Today I released her.
Not from love, because love never leaves, but from all the heaviness still attached to this human life. I released her from any guilt, pain, suffering, sadness, anger, or unfinished weight she may still have been carrying connected to me or to this lifetime. I let her go with gratitude, compassion, and love because more than anything now, I simply want her soul to feel free.
And the truth is, these last eight weeks have changed me deeply too.
It feels like something heavy that I have carried for most of my life has slowly been lifting from me, and I do not think I fully realised until recently just how much I had been holding inside myself all these years. The feelings of rejection, abandonment, sadness, never fully feeling enough, always trying harder, always searching for reassurance or love in places that could never quite give it in the way I needed.
Even as a child, I was often physically unwell, and now I can see so clearly how deeply the body holds onto emotional pain when it is never fully acknowledged or understood. So much of what we carry sits quietly inside us for years. It settles into the nervous system, into the body, into the way we move through life, and after a while it simply becomes part of who we think we are.
But over these last few weeks, as I have allowed myself to truly feel everything with compassion instead of resistance, I can feel so much beginning to soften and release inside me. Not through blame, and not through needing to relive every painful moment, but through understanding. Through awareness. Through finally seeing my mum differently, seeing myself differently, and understanding that we were both simply humans carrying experiences far bigger than either of us fully understood at the time.
And honestly, I feel lighter.
Not just emotionally, but within myself as a whole. It feels like layers of heaviness I have carried for years are no longer sitting in my body the same way they once did. I think sometimes we carry emotional pain for so long that it quietly becomes part of our physical body too, part of our nervous system, our exhaustion, our tension, the weight we hold without even realising it. And when understanding, forgiveness, grief, compassion, and awareness finally move through us, something begins shifting on every level.
And I do sometimes find myself wondering whether all of these experiences, all of the pain, the emotional distance, the longing to feel seen and understood, has somehow shaped the work I do now and the way I connect with people.
Because when you have experienced deep emotions yourself, when you have spent years trying to understand pain, grief, sadness, healing, and the human experience, it naturally creates a different level of compassion and awareness for others. You begin seeing beyond people’s reactions and behaviours and start recognising the hurt, the nervous system, the inner child, the unmet needs, and the stories they have carried too.
And maybe that is part of what healing really is.
Not becoming hardened by our experiences, but allowing them to soften us into deeper understanding, deeper compassion, and deeper connection with ourselves and with others.
And underneath all of that pain, underneath the grief, the unmet needs, the sadness, and all the stories I carried for years about not being enough, there was still love there.
Not perfect human love, because humans are layered and wounded and learning too, but a deeper love that sits underneath all of it. A love that has allowed me to finally see my mum not only as “my mother,” but as a soul who also struggled deeply during her human experience.
I know how deeply I loved her, and I know she loved me in the ways she was capable of with the awareness she had at the time. And somehow that understanding has brought me more peace than holding onto the pain ever did.
I think healing happens when we stop waiting for the past to become something different and instead allow ourselves to gently understand what we have been carrying for so long, so we no longer need to keep holding it inside our bodies forever.
So today, on Mother’s Day, I choose love.
I choose forgiveness.
I choose freedom.
For her, and for myself.
🤍With love, Nadine x
