19/06/2026
6 whole years since my beautiful Mum died. As I reflect, I see a rite of passage SO clearly now.
Not in the romanticised way we talk about growth & transformation. Not because I am grateful she died, I’m not. It left a hole in my life that will never be filled.
I still miss her voice, advice, her fierce tending & sharp tongue. I miss being someone’s daughter in the way only she allowed me to be. But crossing that threshold changed me.
I was no stranger to loss.Dad died when I was 9 and I watched grief move through my family then.
I saw mum carry her own loss whilst trying to survive the demands of everyday life;a widowed parent of 2. I watched what happens when there isn’t enough space or permission to fully tend to grief. How it settles in & quietly shapes a life.
Around that time, I made a promise: if life ever brought me back here, I would meet it differently. Not by avoiding pain, not by pretending I was fine but by letting it move through me.
At the time Mum died, I was a new mother myself.I was unhappy and unfulfilled in my teaching career & disconnected from myself. Exhausted by the system.
Something in me already knew I couldn’t continue as I was, then life intervened.
The world had already begun to shift. Lockdowns were just lifting and everything familiar was already shifting.
And in the months after she left, something new sprouted.
I found circle work & art journaling.I trained as a cycle coach, deepened my relationship with spirit, nature, body and wisdom I had spent years overlooking.
I moved house,left teaching. I began walking the path that became the work I offer today.
What strikes me most 6 years on, is how little space we are given to honour these moments.
Not just grief but all rites of passage.Birth, Death, First bleeds, Motherhood, Menopause. All of life’s becoming and unbecoming.
We are taught to carry on, to return to 'normal'. To get back to who we were.
But nothing in me returned & I don’t think it’s meant to. Grief and life now move side by side and I'm richer for it. The depth of my love is the depth of my pain. Both things true at once.
I still miss her and I am still here & evolved having stepped willingly through.
