Why Mother's Day Hurts (Even If You're Fine With Your Mum)

If your chest tightened on Mother's Day and you couldn't quite name why, you are not alone.

You might have a great relationship with your mum.

You might have a difficult one.

You might be estranged.

You might be grieving her.

You might be the mum yourself, wondering why a day designed to celebrate you somehow lands heavier than any other day of the year.

Whatever the relationship, the day landed in the body. The jaw tightened. The breath got shallow. The chest did a thing it does not usually do. And the mind, looking around for an explanation, found none — because the explanation is not in the mind.

It is in the body.

And the body has been holding what the mind could not name.

This year I spent Mother's Day in ceremony in the Sacred Valley.

Fourteen hours.

Wachuma — a plant medicine that does not let you intellectualise anything. It opens the body, it opens the line, and whatever the line has been carrying comes through whether you are ready for it or not.

What came up was not only mine.

There was sadness older than me. There was fear that had been waiting in the body for years. There was a particular grief I knew belonged to my grandmother, that I had inherited through my mother, that had been living in a body I have been walking around in for forty-one years without ever really meeting.

And there was the ache of the day itself. The day I could not call my mum.

I sat with all of it for hours.

What the medicine showed me, again, is what the work has been teaching me for years.

The body does not care about the story you tell about your mother.

The body does not care if the relationship is good or bad or estranged or repaired.

The body holds what the line could not put down.

There is a researcher called Stanislav Grof. He spent decades mapping what happens to a developing baby in the womb. What he found is that the foetus absorbs everything the mother is feeling. The cortisol in her bloodstream. The unprocessed grief. The anxiety she has been carrying since her own mother carried her.

For nine months, the baby is bathed in it.

And it goes deeper.

Before your mother was born, your grandmother, your mother, and the earliest cellular trace of you were all in the same body. Your mother, as a four-month-old foetus in your grandmother's womb, already had every egg she would ever produce.

Including the one that became you.

So you did not just spend nine months in your mother.

You spent five months in your grandmother.

Three generations of women in one body. That is the inheritance. That is what the body has been carrying. That is what Mother's Day makes loud.

There is a line in the book I wrote about all of this:

"Ancestral trauma is passed down like an heirloom until someone looks at it and decides the passing down stops here."

The body has been waiting for someone in the line to be that person.

If the day landed in your body, here is what nobody told you.

You do not have an anxiety problem.

You have a regulation problem.

The anxiety you have been managing for years is not a chemical imbalance. It is not a personality trait. It is not something to medicate or affirm away. It is the body holding an inheritance that was never yours to keep.

Which means it is not yours to carry forever.

The work that moves it is not in the head. You cannot read your way out of it. You cannot do another course in it. You cannot diagnose your way through it.

The work is in the body.

The breath. The tissue. The held places that the mind cannot reach. The slow, patient practice of teaching a nervous system that learned to brace before it had words why that it is now, finally, safe to soften.

When that work begins, the chest unclenches. The 3am wake-up stops. The body comes home.

And the line ends with the one who decided to put it down.

The bloodline that heals one generation saves four. Yours. Your mother's. Your grandmother's. The one downstream of you, whether that is your children, the children you may never have, the people you are sister to, or the version of you that has been carrying this for forty years.

The work begins in the body. And the door is open.

Our upcoming in-depth mother wound workshop "Her Pain Stops Here" is where this work goes deep.

Click here to register your spot.

The body has been waiting.

Mothers day arrived to remind you to BE THE MUM YOU WANTED HER TO BECOME!