12. Grieving a Mother Who is Still Alive

Are you grieving a mother who is still alive? This feels like mourning a maternal relationship that is unresolved, confusing, or missing something essential, like the love, safety, or presence you needed but didn’t receive from her. 

Today's important conversation, of Navigating Motherhood Without Your Mother is an invitation for you to honor this complicated grieving journey. Join Alyssa Carlene in processing all of these intense feelings and acknowledging your loss. 

Listen to the episode to answer the following questions: 

• Why does it hurt so much when my mother is still alive? 
• Can I grieve someone who is still here and didn't physically leave me or die? 
• What am I grieving when I think about my mother? 
• How do I make peace with what I never received? 
• Is it okay to set boundaries with someone I still long for? 
• Where can I turn for support in my grieving process/journey? 
• How do I allow myself to feel without judgment? 

Want to chat more about how to navigate motherhood without your mother and get personalized support? Send Alyssa Carlene a DM on Instagram!

Transcript

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There's a name for the deep, ongoing grief we feel when we lose someone emotionally, even if they are still physically alive. It's mourning a relationship that is unresolved, confusing, or missing something essential like the love, safety, or presence that we needed but didn't receive. It's called ambiguous grief. In the case of a mother who Ambiguous grief can arise when she is emotionally unavailable, distant, unsafe, estranged, or unable to mother you in the ways that you needed. You grieve not just what was lost, but also what never was. You're listening to Navigating Motherhood Without Your Mother. Here, we help moms with young children who lack maternal support to overcome childhood wounds and break harmful generational patterns through the five-step Roots framework. My name is Alyssa Carlene. I am a motherhood empowerment and generational healing coach. My mission is to help you discover the root causes of your struggles so you can learn to regulate your emotions and create a healthy loving home environment for your family. Please remember that my podcast content is for educational purposes only and should never replace proper medical and mental health guidance from licensed professionals. If you're looking for a safe place to land in navigating the wild ride that is motherhood without maternal support, Join me over on my Instagram at alissa.carleen.rogers. I hope to continue to grow and create a sisterhood of mothers in the same boat who can support, guide, and love one another. Let's get started. Today's show is such an important conversation. When we hear or talk about grief, It's like we normally think about a physical loss and death, but grief is so multifaceted. This specific grief of grieving a mother who is in fact still here on this earth is heavy. It's isolating and it's confusing and it might even feel taboo to talk about. It's a kind of loss that isn't often named, but it is real and it does matter. So today we will talk about the experience of such an ambiguous grief, mourning the relationship you needed but never had, holding space for the pain of what was missing, and beginning to honor your healing process through seven simple but powerful ways to acknowledge and process grief. all of this. So if you're new around here and this is your first time listening to my show, you may like to stop and listen to my very first episode, Welcome to Navigating Motherhood Without Your Mother. If you'd like more of my specific backstory, I go into detail about my childhood, upbringing, and more of the mission of this show. I just bring this up because I very much I'm grieving my mother too, who is still alive. And it might be helpful for you to hear more about what that's like for me and what it was like for me growing up. So if you feel so inclined, that episode is here for you. The first way that we can acknowledge and process this grief is by honestly naming it as a loss. This is a loss. And because of this, you might not even really be aware of it. But in some way, shape, or form, you are grieving. Grief can show up anywhere. One of my top favorite books that I read as I began healing my mother wound a few years back is called Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel. This book... changed my life. It sparked so much for me and it was the first time that I truly acknowledged my loss and gave it a name, which is Mother Hunger. So I highly recommend the book. When you can name and genuinely acknowledge that this mother-daughter relationship feels very severed, broken, and hurt, then you can simply admit to yourself, I am grieving a mother I never fully had. Yes, it's painful. Even me saying it right now is bringing some stuff up. But it's also powerful because naming the truth honors you and your experience. It makes the invisible visible. Second, I talk about this principle all the time on this show, and that is to allow yourself to feel. And the kicker here is to do it without judgment. This might feel like an adjustment. I know that for me, I learned a lot of judgmental behavior from my mother, which in turn has impacted the way I look and judge myself. And if one thing is for sure, you just can't be so hard on yourself, especially as a mom. If for so long you've suppressed these feelings, the loss of your mother, and you've been in denial of of this emotional overwhelm. It may sting to actually see things and feel them for what they really are. Anger, sadness, guilt, numbness, whatever comes up is all valid. And you let the feelings rise without rushing to fix them or explain them away. Go back to episode nine in this show, and you'll be able to have a great one for really sitting with serious, uncomfortable emotions. The next thing you can do as you acknowledge and process this grief is to write a letter that you'll never send. I'm sure you've heard this before and maybe you've done it, but if you haven't, I highly recommend that you do this. You don't even have to physically write it out. I know that as moms, we have a lot on our plate. So you can type something up in your phone or record a voice memo. Whatever way you can get out these feelings and thoughts from your mind and body onto something else out of you, then you can rip it up, you can burn it, do whatever feels best. And then you allow that to metaphorically repair this relationship. Because for a lot of us, We can't just write this letter to our mom with all these feelings and emotions and anger and pain and maybe some mean things that we want to get out and say. It wouldn't be well received. It wouldn't be smart. So do it. And maybe you're writing this letter to your mother or somebody else. Maybe it's a kinder letter to your younger self. But really, you don't have to make this letter polite. You just want to be raw. and angry, you want to get whatever is stuck inside of you out. Get it out of your head, get it out of your body. And something I love is to bring your creator, bring God, bring what you believe, the universe, whatever it is you believe, bring that component, the divine, spiritual, higher power. For me, it's God, it's Jesus into this and pray all Often, speak often. I speak often to God and pray to him and asking his help in processing such big, deep emotions and grief. Number four is to grieve the specific things you missed. I would recommend writing them down and really get specific. Here are a couple examples. You can say, I grieve not being comforted when I was scared. I grieve not having a safe place to land. When you grieve these specifics, it helps you move through it more gently. And again, honestly, because we're talking about being honest and authentic with our feelings, with our grief. So here's a personal example. I grieve that I can't rely on my mother or call her every day because of her incapabilities and mental illness. I grieve the guidance I could have had growing up in making huge life decisions. I grieve a grandmother for my kids. When you become specific about this grief, it helps you know what you can focus on as you are trying to fill this void with something else, whether it's love, friendship, whatever that specific thing is, now you know. The fifth way to process is by creating rituals for closure. You can light a candle, speak a prayer, plant something, create a piece of art, whatever you need. I think something tangible is also really helpful to honor the grief and then mark that healing. I debated sharing this example with you because this is something I did, a ritual that was really powerful and I consider sacred. But I feel like it's worth sharing and it's worth you hearing because of the impact that it had on me. A few years ago, after a major traumatic experience with my mother, my mom, long story short, she died by overdose. I know you're thinking, what? This episode is about grieving a mom that's still alive. You're talking about your mom that's alive. Well, she died. And then she came back to life. And it was a very excruciating ordeal. And I don't know how to say it other than my whole world flipped upside down. And I went to work with a woman who specializes in Native American spirituality, massage, energy work. And I shared with her this entire experience and what had happened and how I I said goodbye to my mother in a hospital room. She was on a ventilator and it was very traumatic. And I left that room just in tears, processing, feeling at peace, but also deeply devastated. And then hours later, she somehow miraculously, science could not explain it, comes back to life and then dies. feeling like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. I can't believe this. This has been a nightmare. What is going on? All these really uncomfortable, scary emotions. And like I said, I shared this experience with this woman and she said, you need to let go and release some of this energy that you have connected to your mother right now because it's not healthy. And so she brought up my energetic umbilical cord. She said, your energetic umbilical cord is still connected to your mother. And that if I wanted to, and if I was ready, she could help me reconnect this cord. So disconnect it from my mother. Again, we're talking energy here and reconnect it to something or someone else. And I, you know, remember thinking, well, there's nobody else I feel like I can connect it to. No other women. And so then she suggested, what if we connect this cord to Mother Earth? And she took me through a very special ritual that was beautiful and sacred for me to connect my energetic umbilical cord to the Earth. And Mother Earth is my adopted mother. It's my mother now that I fully embrace now. And the amazing thing about this is that the practitioner even told me that I could come back someday and we could do it again and reconnect to my mother if I wanted to. It was just something that I needed. It was a ritual. It was closure. And I truly believe, I'm a firm believer in the energy around us and our connections to one another. And I needed that. So that's what I did. Number six is finding new sources of mothering. I'm still working on this, but I do feel like I have discovered some incredible maternal guides and women in my life who are here for me while my mom can't be. So healing involves seeking this nurturing. You can seek a mentor, friend, therapist, and mentor I think most important of all is learning to mother yourself in the ways that you deserve. This is a recurring theme throughout my show. It's as you're mothering your children, you're also mothering that little girl inside of you. Finally, give yourself the ongoing permission to grieve. This grief, it doesn't have a clean ending point. It is layered. It's like an onion. Peel back the layers. There's so much that we're talking about and it will resurface at different stages of your life. Like when you probably experienced when you became a mother. I think that we've all heard the phrase, grief has no timeline. So we must honor that. And we are allowed to return to this grief as much and many times as we need. I just think that there are healthy ways we can process and move through the pain. And that's what I'm sharing with you. Being witnessed in this grief, even just by one other person, somebody that you feel safe in sharing this with really can soften your loneliness. And I hope that my podcast can do this for you. It's why I created it. And I feel so passionate about sharing Everything that I share on here because it's deeply personal and because I too crave that connection with other moms and other women who have experienced what I have experienced. Grieving a mother who is still living is a tender, complicated kind of grief and you are allowed to feel all of it. Remember, we are naming our loss. allowing ourselves to feel without judgment, writing a letter that we will never send, grieving specific things, creating a ritual for closure, finding new sources of mothering, and then giving yourself that permission to grieve. Even in the ache, you are not alone. I say this every episode, you are not alone. I know what it feels like. I have felt that deep loneliness and isolation, and it has been very healing to share my story and share these experiences. I'm just so proud of you for honoring your heart today, for taking the time to listen. It means so much to me. And if this episode resonated with you, please, I want to keep in touch. I really, I want to meet you. I would love to hear from you. So Let's keep in touch. You can connect with me on Instagram. Send me a DM. Seriously, I mean it from the bottom of my heart. I would love to hear from you, to talk with you, to share our stories together. You are worthy of love, healing, and gentleness right here, right now. I'm holding you in my heart as you continue this journey. You're not alone. You've got this. You are held in something bigger than your pain. Love is finding you even now, even here.