05/05/2026
This week I traveled to three different cities to see my three adult children. While it felt glorious, it felt also like a form of grief I wasn’t prepared for.
Not the grief of loss, but the grief of transformation.
The mother I was — the one whose body was the answer to every need, whose presence organized the day, whose role was to be needed — is no longer who they require. And if I’m honest, she’s no longer who I am.
What Jung understood about midlife applies here with unusual precision: the psyche will not let you inhabit an identity that has outlived its purpose.
The role that once gave life its shape becomes, at a certain point, a constraint. And the discomfort you feel is not failure. It’s the pressure of something larger trying to emerge.
The mother of adults is not the mother of children. She is someone else entirely — someone I am still learning to become.
And this Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about my own mother, who lived this passage before me. How little I understood then about what it must have cost her to watch us scatter, to become people who no longer needed her in the old ways. How unaware I was of the transformation she was navigating while I was busy becoming myself.
If you are in this passage — or if you are watching your mother in it, perhaps for the first time with actual comprehension — I see you. The transformation is real. The loss is real. And so is what’s trying to be born.
