“Our therapist has a note for you,” my dad texted me.
“What’d she say??” I hadn’t seen our therapist in two months; so I couldn’t imagine what she needed to tell me so urgently.
“I don’t know. She wrote something to you on a piece of paper and gave it to me.”
My curiosity was beyond piqued, so I hovered near the door waiting for him to return home. When he came in he handed me a small torn square of yellow legal paper, and I unfolded it to read what she had to say.
My therapist was integral to me learning how to function as a human in society. Notice I didn’t say “again.” Instead, it was for the first time.
I lost my mom in December 2022 after caregiving for her full-time for eight years. The role began immediately after graduating college, but even so, I didn’t get to participate in a lot of college-aged experiences during that time:
Living away from home.
College parties.
Internships.
Discovering who I was away from my family’s perceptions and expectations.
I had a theory about our mother-daughter dynamic before therapy. I felt my mom loved me too much; there really can be too much of a good thing, you know.
To me, her coming to terms with losing the stages of human growth she adored the most (babies, toddlers, young children) was unbearable to witness in her own children.
I was a pre-teen when I started developing my own individualistic thoughts and feelings; I wasn’t her cute, palatable, and mailable baby anymore and I think that scared her to her core.
Because she thought she couldn’t protect me in the way she felt was best without controlling nearly my every move.
Her fear of what could happen to me when facing the world overshadowed the necessity of letting me face it to begin with. I spent over three decades in that shadow and it took us getting space from one another in the most unfortunate way to gain the freedom to explore at least a decade’s worth of life and experiences that I’d missed out on.
And that also included new dating experiences.
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