Mother's Day and the Power of Reset: Finding Wholeness Amidst Grief and Growth

This special Mother’s Day episode dives into the layered emotions of motherhood—love, grief, resilience, and renewal. Lori shares her personal journey and insights on how grief reshapes us and why taking mental resets is vital for growth and healing.

Key topics:

•  The duality of Mother’s Day — celebration and loss
•  How grief reorganizes the architecture of our lives and identities
•  The importance of mental resets as survival tools in motherhood
•  The concept of “missing pieces” and how they refine rather than define us
•  Redefining strength through honesty, pause, and resilience
•  The evolving nature of motherhood and identity at the shoreline
•  Practical ways to embrace resets: asking for help, setting boundaries, forgiving oneself
•  The significance of integrating grief and honoring the past while building the future
•  The power of choosing to move forward differently—not backward

 Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction to the layered feelings of Mother’s Day

00:12 - The reality behind the idealized Mother’s Day 

00:45 - Grief’s impact on life and identity 

01:17 - Surviving and adapting after loss 

01:57 - The silence and gaps in sacred spaces 

02:28 - What happens when the pillar of strength cracks 

02:51 - Mothering while evolving and mental resets as essential tools 

03:21 - Reflecting on personal growth and change through motherhood 

03:50 - The importance of mental health and self-care 

04:37 - Making space for grief and loss 

05:08 - The shoreline metaphor: grief, motherhood, growth 

05:58 - How each child witnesses a different version of mothering 

06:28 - The ongoing evolution of motherhood over the years 

07:12 - Resistance to resets and embracing water over concrete 

07:43 - Redefining strength: honesty, pause, and healing 

08:16 - The transformative power of pieces falling away 

09:14 - Grief and love coexistence 

09:33 - Facing the terrifying truth of change 

10:01 - The promise of resilience and forging new paths 

10:43 - Honoring internal struggles while continuing to evolve 

11:10 - Encouragement for mothers feeling overwhelmed 

11:40 - Practical steps for mental resets: asking for help, boundaries, forgiveness

12:37 - Redefining strength—inner resilience and honesty 

13:20 - Moving from memory to integration after profound loss 

13:36 - The importance of evolution and the continual process of healing 

14:07 - Acceptance that not all pieces will return 

14:40 - Carrying the past, honoring the present, building the future 

15:08 - Celebrating the resilient, honest, and brave mother 

15:42 - The significance of ongoing resets and continuous growth 

16:29 - Shifting the focus from why to who we are becoming 

16:42 - Motherhood as a shoreline that shifts and reshapes 

17:01 - Embracing the emotional spectrum of Mother’s Day 

17:43 - Encouragement to share the message of reset and renewal 

18:13 - Closing thoughts and gratitude

Resources & Links:

•  Book: Missing Pieces by Lori Kendall 

 Connect with Lori:

• Facebook

 Remember, motherhood and grief are ongoing journeys. Embrace each reset as a step toward becoming more whole and authentic.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

To the real fruited podcast, where real stories mean rounded healing. The founder of reflective roots, where I work as a free navigator, a companion for the tough times in life, author of the missing pieces, the final solution, and your host. Each week we'll explore the experiences, the losses, the breakthroughs, and the honest conversations that transform who we are becoming. This is a space to reconnect with yourself. Reclaim the pieces that you've lost along the way, and grow in ways you never thought were possible or expected. Let's get rooted and begin. What a day. It was definitely harder than I had anticipated. As I'm sure a few of you also shared. You see, Mother's Day is supposed to be simple. Flowers, brunch reservations, and cards with soft pastel letters. Words usually grace the front of the cover, saying grateful and blessed. But for many of us, Mother's Day is layered. It's love and longing, joy and ache, gratitude and grief sitting side by side at the same table. If I'm honest. This day doesn't just celebrate motherhood. It exposes the missing pieces. When I wrote missing pieces, I wasn't trying to write a polished story. What I was trying to do was just survive. Because grief does something that no one prepares you for. It rearranges the architecture of your life. The rooms look the same, the walls still stand, but something essential is gone. And you find yourself walking through your own life, thinking, wondering, how can everything look normal when nothing feels whole? That is what missing pieces means. It's not just loss, it's the disorientation after the loss. It's the way your identity fractures. It's the silence where something sacred used to be. And on Mother's Day That silence can echo. We live in a culture that celebrates mothers as pillars strong, selfless, unshakeable. What happens when the pillar cracks? What happens when the strong one is exhausted? When the caretaker needs care themselves? What happens when the mother feels like she's missing pieces of herself? No one teaches us how to grieve who we used to be. No one teaches us that motherhood itself requires continual mental resets. Not because we failed, but because we are evolving to who we were always destined to be. Think about it. Think about the version of you from five years ago. The woman who didn't yet know what was coming, the woman who hadn't been stretched, the woman who hadn't yet been reshaped by motherhood, by responsibility, by change. She had no idea how strong she would have to become. And yet, here you are. We talk about physical health. We talk about self-care. But we rarely talk about the mental resets that are required as survival tools. A mental reset is not quitting. It's not weakness. It's not denial. It's the courageous decision that we make to just pause. I actually made one of these for myself this past Friday. I stepped away from my career in higher education after six and a half years. You see, after trauma, after loss, after burnout, and after exhaustion crush you. Sometimes the strongest thing a mother can do is admit that she cannot carry yesterday into tomorrow. A reset says I will not let one season of my life define my identity. I will not let grief erase me. I will not let exhaustion turn into resentment. I will breathe and begin again and again and again. At Reflective Roots and on this podcast, Real and Rooted, I talk often about the shoreline. The shoreline is where the water meets the land. It's unstable, it shifts, it erodes, and it reforms. Grief lives at that shoreline. Motherhood lives at that shoreline. Growth lives at that shoreline. Because nothing there stays the same. I heard a recent article or read a recent article, I should say, about how each child that you have gets a different mother. And I at first thought, well, how is that possible? And after further reading, I realized it's because we keep changing. My first child got the immature, impatient, struggling, trying to find myself while mothering him. My second child got the tired, the person trying to keep it all together. Whereas my girls got the more patient, more mature, more educated, and the individual that was able to take time. And if I am honest and I look back, I feel bad for what my boys got. It wasn't anything of their doing, but and it wasn't even my fault. It was the version of which of who I was at that time. Sometimes we resist resets because we are trying to live on the concrete. But the life is water, it moves, and so must we. For some today is beautiful. For others, it's brutal. Motherhood doesn't make us perfect, it makes us powerful. Grief does not make us weak, it makes us deeper. Responsibility does not diminish us, it reveals us. And if there were seasons when you felt like pieces were falling away, let me tell you something. Some pieces had to fall. The self-doubt, the overextending, the silence, the belief that you had to carry everything alone. Those pieces were never meant to define you. You're not missing, you're refining. You're not broken, but you are building. You see, today some are celebrating new babies. Some, like myself, are grieving children. Some are estranged. Some are mothering without ever being mothered themselves. Some are carrying invisible loss. Some are grieving their own mothers. Mother's Day can magnify what's missing. And here's what I want to say to you. The presence of grief does not cancel the presence of love. You can be grateful and grieving, you can be strong and undone. You are not broken for feeling both. There is a moment after trauma where you realize I am not who I was. And that realization in itself is terrifying. Because we want to go back. Back to the version of ourselves that felt comfortable, controlled, and not fractured. Resets don't take us back. They take us forward differently. And this is what missing pieces truly holds. The truth that losing parts of your life does not mean losing your capacity to become who you were destined to be. Some pieces fall away, but others are forged. Resilience, clarity, boundaries, compassion, depth. The woman who you are becoming may not look like the woman you were before. But she is not less. She is layered. Let me speak to the mothers who were smiling today, but fighting internally. The one who is tired beyond sleep, the one who wonders if she's doing enough. The one who constantly compares herself to another, the one who feels like she's falling and failing silently. You are allowed to reset. You are allowed to say this version of me needs support. This pace is unsustainable. This narrative in my head is cruel. A mental reset might look like asking for help, setting boundaries, turning off the noise, starting therapy, saying no without an apology, and most importantly, and probably the hardest, forgiving yourself. It might be invisible to the world, but believe it or not, you are not behind. You are walking patiently, slowly into the person who you are meant to be. And when women choose mental wellness and truly choose it, they change themselves more. They change their homes, they change workplaces, they change communities, they change futures. They change and make it revolutionary inside yourself. We have been sold a narrow definition of strength. Strength is not never crying. Strength is not perfection and it's not overfunctioning. Strength is honesty. Strength is pausing. Strength is choosing to heal instead of harden. On Mother's Day, especially we must redefine strength. Because some of the strongest mothers are the ones quietly rebuilding. After a profound loss, there's often a temptation to freeze time. I know I tried. But survival requires movement, not forgetting, not replacing, but integrating. And that is a mental reset of the deepest kind. It says my story has changed, but it is not over. Grief may have rewritten chapters, but it does not get to write the ending. Here's the paradox. You may never get all the pieces back. I know I won't. The life I had imagined, the timeline that I had planned, the version of motherhood that I thought I would have. But wholeness does not mean untouched. Wholeness means that we've integrated successfully. It can mean I carry what was, I honor what is, and I build what can still be. That is not denial, that is courage. You are not alone. You are not defective, you're not failing. You are evolving under pressure. And evolution is rarely graceful. Sometimes it looks like tears in the car. Sometimes it looks like quiet resilience. Sometimes it looks like stepping back so that you can step forward differently. So tonight I don't want you walking out of the day without knowing this. You are still here, you are still standing, you are still loving. But most of all, you're still evolving. And whatever has shifted in your life, whatever has stretched you, whatever has required you to reset, it does not get to define your ending. Resetting is not abandoning your role, it's preserving your soul within it. So today, on Mother's Day, I offer an invitation. Instead of asking, Am I enough? Ask what needs to reset so that I can breathe again. Instead of asking why I am not who I was. Ask who am I becoming now? And instead of clinging to the missing pieces, honor them, name them, and gently continue. Motherhood is not a static identity. It's living at a shoreline. It shifts, it reshapes you, it requires you to begin again and again and again, just like I said before. But if you are celebrating today, celebrate deeply. If you are grieving today, grieve honestly. And if you are somewhere in between, that is sacred too. Because missing pieces do not erase who you are. They refine you, they deepen you, they invite you to reset, not because you are weak, but because you are brave enough to keep becoming who you are. And if grief has changed your life, it does not get to define your ending. And for that, I am extremely grateful. I want to thank you for joining me this evening. And if this episode has spoken to you, or you know someone else who may benefit from it, I encourage you to share it. It may be the Mother's Day message, but it is a message that can give you insight and ideas and permission to reset today, tomorrow. But don't let it go any longer than that. Thank you for joining me this evening, and I wish you all the very best. In Missing Pieces, the final salute, a mother's journey through service, sorrow, and survival. You'll walk through my story of preparing for the service of grief, of resilience, and rediscovery. And along the way, I hope you find space for your own story. This book isn't about being perfect. It's about becoming whole again, even when some pieces feel forever changed. Order your copy of Missing Pieces today on Amazon or at missingpiecesbook.com. Join other readers who are finding their own story. Encapsulate it within the pages. Gain insights and learn more at Real and Rooted Podcast, where real stories take root in healing roots. Missing Pieces, the final story, a mother's dream for the story of love.