Okay - thank you for listening to me touch in on a very important piece of life right now (you can blame my Aquarius rising and Libra sun for wanting to bring justice to this imperfectly just world). It does still feel weird to write about myself but I’m hoping in doing so it either inspires or helps someone else along their journey. So thank you in advance for being here and supporting me. <3

I knew going into this year I was going to be given some curve balls. With Pluto taking its chokehold in my first house of self I was prepared for a deep rebirth of who I think myself to be over the next 18 years. I was mentally preparing for a “blowing up” of my identity. What I wasn’t prepared for was loss. January 11th, 2025 I embarked on a overnight woman’s retreat in Camp Colton, OR, alone. I didn’t know a single person but I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something I was afraid of and come out of the experience not only better, but with a deeper sense of what I wanted to seek out next. It was a beautiful event full of sisterhood, connection, and community. Across the massive circle from me was a young woman who shared how special this event was and how much it meant for her to be able to attend. She had almost not made the event as her great grandmother had recently passed and thought being around so many people would feel overwhelming. She reflected on a recent memory of her family when her great grandmother was still alive that will now forever live in my head. The memory was that of her and her mother, her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother. Four generations of women together, sharing stories and experiences. Passing down inner feminine wisdom, the gift of nurturing, and motherhood. I remember sitting there listening to how beautiful this moment for her was and at the same time thinking to myself, “Damn, I will never have that. I will never know how infinite the power of standing next to generations of the mothers in my family will feel. I will never have the “mother” to teach me all of the inner wisdom of what it is to be a woman. And if I want sisterhood, if I want access to this sacred space so many receive from their mothers, I will need to create it in myself, seek it out intentionally. This will never be passed down to me.”

The event wrapped up on January 12th with an early morning tea ceremony which was so peaceful and powerful it brought me to tears. I drove home on a high, full of love, lightheartedness, ready to take on a whole new year, a whole new me. It’s a little funny to me how unknowingly knowing I can be sometimes. This sensation of finality that I had about carving out the sacred spaces I want for my life as they will never be handed down to me came so much faster, in a way, than I could have expected. I was informed later that evening that my biological mother had passed away on that same afternoon, only hours prior. Her condition was not good as she had been dealing with alcohol induced dementia for about 8 years, and our relationship had been strained for about three times longer than that. So you could say the finality of me never getting to have a relationship to “mother” had come years ago, but this really was final. Over the last few years I had visited her when I would visit home. These short, inconsistent, sometimes sitting in silence visits would compound to create the closest relationship I had with her since I was a child. While her condition stole every last opportunity of me being able to truly know the woman who gave me life, in these disconnected and often uncomfortable sits, there were moments of coherence; glimpses of acknowledgment and love.

I used to be so afraid of this exact thing happening. That I would wait too long to try to repair our relationship and something would happen one day that would make it impossible to do so. It’s been a long time grieving the reality of that fear and at the same time it feels like the very beginning of a grieving process. What I wanted so desperately but thought was now never going to happen - to get to know or have a relationship with her - has almost happened more since her passing than maybe ever would have happened prior. Hundreds of unseen by me photos from my childhood, cards I handmade in school, documentation of my first year of life, and dozens of stories told by extended family members about their sister and friend have brought me closer to who I never knew she was. It’s wild to think that someone I should have been close with my whole life but wasn’t, could feel more connected to me now that they are no longer here versus ever before. I think about all of the moments I never had, all of the questions I never got to ask, all of the love I never felt and now have to rely on photos and stories to fill those gaps. I’m so grateful for all of the glimpses of memories that were collected back then so that I can look at them now and see the world that she saw, through her own perspective.

Loss is a wild ride, especially when the person you lose is not the same person that others lost. The woman I remember, the mother I had, was not the friend and sister others grieve. It’s like grieving who I thought I knew, getting to know a whole new human, and then also grieving them. I don’t think this cycle ever truly ends but for now I sit with knowing how much my brother and I truly were loved, and for me that is enough.