Mother’s Day Without Her | Grief, Healing, Forgiveness & Finding My Mother Again

Mother’s Day can be beautiful, painful, healing, complicated and sometimes all of those things at once.

In this deeply personal episode of Elevate Within, Sandy Davis shares raw reflections, journal-style writings, and intimate stories about her relationship with her mother, grief after loss, childhood trauma, healing, forgiveness, and the journey of finally understanding her mother beyond the pain.

Through vulnerable storytelling, Sandy opens up about growing up longing for her mother’s love while also fearing her, the emotional impact of unresolved trauma, reconnecting later in life, and the profound realization that her mother was a woman navigating her own wounds, survival, and silent battles. This episode explores how grief evolves over time and what it means to carry love, loss, and understanding together at once.

This episode includes reflections on:
• Mother-daughter relationships and emotional healing
• Grief after losing a parent
• Childhood trauma and forgiveness
• Healing complicated family relationships
• Postpartum depression and generational pain
• Identity, resilience, and emotional growth
• Learning to see your parents as human beings
• Navigating Mother’s Day after loss
• Love, grief, and finding peace after reconciliation

Elevate Within is a transformational podcast for women navigating grief, healing, burnout, emotional wellness, identity shifts, reinvention, and personal growth through honest conversations about the “messy middle” of life.

If this episode resonates with you, subscribe and share Elevate Within on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube for more conversations centered around healing, rebuilding, and rising from within.

Connect with Sandy Davis:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ElevateWithinAlways
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-davis-abb21236/
Website: https://elevateopsadvisory.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Elevate Within, a space where we rise personally, professionally, and from within. I'm your host, Sandy Davis. Today's episode is a little different. With Mother's Day coming up, I wanted to create a space for something that can be both beautiful and heavy. For some, it's a day filled with love and connection. And for others, it can bring up grief, complicated memories, or things left unsaid. Wherever you are in that, this space is for you. Today I'm going to share a few pieces I wrote about my mom and reflect on our relationship, what it was, what it wasn't, and what I've come to understand over time. This is going to be raw, unedited, so bear with me as I try to get through this. This first piece I wrote is called She Gave Me What She Could. She gave me what she could. I became what she couldn't. That realization didn't come from pain. It came from understanding. For a long time I only saw what was missing, what I didn't receive, what I needed, but didn't have. But as I've grown, healed, and reflected, I started to see her differently, not just as my mother, but as a young woman navigating her own trauma, her fears, her own limitations. She didn't have the tools, she didn't have the support, she didn't always have the capacity. But she gave me what she could. And somehow, through all of it, I became someone who could give what I never received. I became compassionate. I became resilient. I became someone who sees people deeply. Not because life was easy, but because it wasn't. This isn't about excusing the past. It's about understanding it and choosing what comes next. Some of us don't come from what we needed, so we became it for ourselves, for others, for the version of us that once felt unseen.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

And that is where the shift begins. Rest in power, Ma. This peace still sits with me.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

The relationship with my mom wasn't simple. There was love, but there was also strain. There were moments of closeness and moments of deep pain. There was the physical abuse, there was the depression, a kind that came from not feeling loved herself. As a child, I didn't understand that. I wanted to feel chosen by her, safe with her. I damn near worship my mother and feared her at the same time. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that. And for a long time I carried this question with me. Am I good enough to be loved by her? And then life happened. There were years where we didn't speak, years lost in silence, but eventually we found our way back to each other. We had a hard conversation. Actually, many. You know, the ones that aren't easy but necessary. I told her that I needed her. And she told me that she was proud of me. She told me that she loved me. And for the first time, it felt different. It felt real. We started texting and calling damn near every day. I was in a good place. Our relationship had healed. It was a relationship I had always wanted. It was just in a different season of our lives. And I'm grateful that we had that time, for sure. This next piece I want to read is called Giving Her Her Flowers while she adjusts my crown. I actually wrote this on my birthday uh last month, so bear with me as I try to get through it. For most of my life, I thought I understood my mother. I thought I had her figured out. I made sense of her the only way I knew how, based on what I experienced, what I felt, and what I didn't receive. But last week, I realized something that changed everything. My mom likely suffered from postpartum depression when she had me. And in the 70s, there wasn't language for that. There wasn't grace for women who struggled to bond with their children. There was judgment, labels, words like cold, distant, and sometimes even evil. And I think my mother carried that. She carried all of it. She was young. She had her own trauma. She was still trying to survive herself in a world that didn't give her the tools to understand what she was going through. And for years, I carried that misunderstanding with me. There were moments when her pain came out in ways I didn't understand as a child. When she lashed out, I felt like I was a stranger in her home, or maybe a reflection of something in her past that she feared and didn't know how to face. Looking back now, I don't believe it was truly me she was fighting. It was her own demons. And maybe in some way she thought she was protecting me from becoming them. I feared her at times. I longed for her love. I questioned if I was worthy of it. I loved her deeply, but I didn't trust that she loved me back. So I protected myself. I kept my guard up. And I think she knew. She didn't fight me on it. She didn't try to convince me otherwise. Sometimes she would just say, I may not have been a good mother, but I was a great provider. But now I see something I couldn't see before. She wasn't a villain in my story. She was a woman doing the best that she could with what she had. And when I look back now, I don't just see the pain. I see her. I see a woman who was beautiful, elegant, and full of quiet confidence. I remember standing in the doorway of her bedroom in the mornings, watching her, taking her time, getting ready. She always focused on her eyes, soft smoky hues of purple and brown, then finished with a deep red lipstick that made her feel complete. She had class, a presence, a standard. She used to tell me, you have two strikes against you. You're a woman and you're black. So you have to work harder than anyone else just to get ahead in life. She made sure I knew who I was, where I came from. That I was to hold my head up high no matter what. She was Puerto Rican, Italian, and Russian. She carried cultures and her bones, music and her spirit, strength and her voice. She was an artist in every sense of the word. She sewed her own clothes for work. She'd make dresses for me and my dolls. She knit, she crocheted, she cross stitched and needlepoint pieces that still hang in my home today. She wrote beautifully in her journals, so vividly you can step into her stories and feel them. And even in the middle of everything she carried, she created moments moments that at the time I didn't realize were love. Every Halloween she made my costumes by hand, not store bought, sewn by hand. She even created an inside label that said creations by Selena. She would do my makeup, my hair, take her time with me like I was her masterpiece. In the winter, we had our weekends. She would call movie theaters back when you had to listen to the recordings to get show times, pick two or three movies, and we go watch one, then sneak into another. After, we'd go to eat Pizza Beat, Nathan's Hot Dogs with the arcade in the back room, or a red lobster. Then we go home, shower, and watch Star Trek like it was a ritual we had never questioned. In the summer, we lived at Tippett's pool. She'd be laid out in the sun, burning like she always did. And I'd be in the water all day long. When we got home, she would make something simple, and I'd rub aloe all over her skin while we both cooled down. And the music, oh, it was always music. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Aretha Franklin, Celia Cruz, Linda Ronston, the Beatles, and Jazz. House was never quiet. And the other day I realized something. On weekends, I'd do the same thing. I turn on my music and I let it play all day while I move throughout the house. I didn't even realize that. That was her. That was something she gave me that never left. Every year, like clockwork, she would call me early in the morning on my birthday, and she would tell me the story of the day I was born. I would act embarrassed sometimes, like it was too much. But it wasn't. Because inside, I was that little girl again, soaking in every word, her voice, her storytelling, her dramatics. She loved an audience, and I loved her. She would say you were small, brown, hairy, like a little sleeping mouse. My little mouse. Now I understand something I didn't before. Those weren't the words of a detached mother. That was a woman who felt something, even if she didn't always know how to hold on to it properly. But what I miss now isn't just her. I miss how she made me feel in those moments. My mom wrote a book for my daughter who was never born. My daughter, Isabella Flora. I couldn't read it for years. I wasn't ready. The grief was too heavy, too close. When my mother passed away, I found that book in my closet and decided to read it. I heard her voice as I read it. I heard her laugh and the humor. I felt her love. After she passed, I didn't even have an urn for her yet. Her ashes were still in a box. One night I went to kiss her good night, and the wooden box she had made years ago, one that I had never really opened, fell off the shelf, and it hit me right on top of my head. And when it landed on the ground, a note slipped out of it. And in her handwriting it read, My dearest mouse, my daughter, my heart, I love you. And I broke. Because in that moment I knew she was there. She had always been there. It took me fifty years to understand my mother, to release the anger, to release the fear, to see her fully. She gave me what she could, and I became who she couldn't. But more than that, she never left me. She's in my music. She's in my work ethic. She's in my storytelling. She's in the way I love. She is me. It's my fifty-first birthday today, and I'm okay. More than okay. I know I'll be fine. Because I'm not alone. And today I give her her flowers. I kiss her crown. As she adjusts mine. And this morning, if I sit still long enough, I can hear her soft, clear, right beside me.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Happy birthday, Mouse. After my mom passed, I found her journals.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

And reading them, it felt like she was speaking to me directly. There were thoughts, feelings, truths that she never said out loud. And somehow it felt like she knew I would find them one day. One of the things that stayed with me most was when she wrote a story for my daughter, the daughter that I had miscarried. That moment it shifted something in me. I got to see my mom, not just as my mother, but as a woman, a woman who carried her own pain, her own thoughts, her own love, even if she didn't always know how to express it. So for those that have lost their mothers, I know that grief is complicated. There is no right or wrong way to grief. I know it doesn't move in a straight line. And there are some days that feel light, and there are some days that feel heavy. And sometimes it shows up when you least expect it. But what I've learned is you don't get over it. You just learn how to carry it. And over time, how you carry it changes. For me, it's softer now. There's still sadness, but there's also understanding. And there's love in a different form. And there's peace in knowing we found our way back to each other before she left. So today, I just want to honor all mothers. For those of you who still have your own mom, reach out. Give her a hug, a kiss, sit in that moment and really, really be present with her. And for those of you who don't, honor her. Share a story. Speak her name. Because I believe people pass twice, once physically, and the second time when people stop talking about them. So keep them alive in your words. If you're navigating something like this right now, just know that you're not alone in it. There's no right way to process it, just your way. So if this resonated with you, subscribe, follow, or share it with someone who might need this today. You can find me on LinkedIn under Sandra Davis, my website for professional fractional COO services at elevateopsidory.com. And you can read the rest of my writings and podcasts on my Substack called Elevate Within. Thank you for spending time with me. And if no one told you that they loved you today, I love you. Take care. Blessed.