To love me well, set me free.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
I was on the phone with my mom the other day and after she shared some updates about life in Seattle that seemed a bit harrowing, I said "Gosh. I'm glad I'm not there."
She replied: "I'm glad you're not here, too, Tesa."
It seems a little backwards to have that conversation with a parent. Normally they are begging you to come home. Mine is begging me to stay away.
My mom and I had a really tense and distant relationship up until about four years ago, when I, in a desperate attempt to know my own inner material, including why it was I never felt loved by my own mother, declared that I intended to repair our relationship. I asked her if she was interested in repairing it too, and she was. We were both so awkward about it at the time; neither of us really knew what that actually would entail.
Four years later, telling me she was glad I wasn't in Seattle was one of the most loving things she's ever said to me. Loving in the sense that I felt deeply seen by her.
Hers is a kind of love that doesn't grip too tightly, and leaves all the space I need to keep growing.
My mom, more than anyone on the planet, has always known that my success relied heavily on my freedom. If she wanted to stay connected to me, she had to let me go, over and over and over. I've never asked her when she figured this out, but I'm guessing it must've been by the time I was around 4.
And so she's said goodbye to me hundreds of times as I've moved further and further away from home, and launched myself further and further out into the world.
For years I used to harbor a lot of resentment and disdain for how uninvolved she was in my life. I wanted her to know the names of all of my friends and to have my address memorized like all my other friends' moms did. And what took me over 30 years to understand, was that in many ways, she actually knew me better than I knew myself.
She knew I would wilt without freedom. She knew I felt suffocated by constant contact. She knew I needed space to expand my wings. She knew I had big things to do in this life and rarely, if ever, got in my way. In fact, most of the time she coaxed the fire, saying things to me like "you'll never know if you don't try," rather than ever trying to figure out my indecision for me.
I know many people who have totally different relationships with their parents. Ones where the love is overt, where there's lots of face to face time, where the mother holds a more "traditional" role. I spent years hating my mom for not being that kind of mother, having no idea that that was not the kind of mother I needed.
I needed her. I hired her.
My mother, perhaps not totally on purpose, granted me my freedom before I could walk.
I moved away from home two weeks after I turned 18, and never came back. I've known since I was about 12 that I would spend my adulthood in Europe. At the time I thought it was because I wanted to be as far away from my oppressive, dysfunctional family as possible. I bought into the stories from other family members that I had abandoned them when I left. I allowed myself to feel guilty about it even though that wasn't the truth. I wasn't abandoning anyone. I was hungry, and I was consuming life.
To learn, to grow, to experience, to share, to fly, to transmute, to reach out for and touch god, and then share my findings with everyone I come into contact with. This is my Mercurial, mutable, nature. This is my essence.
Almost exactly 20 years after I left home that first time, I'm sitting on my sofa in Copenhagen finishing my application for Danish citizenship (which, once submitted, will sit in a queue pending approval for the next 16-18 months). I have no idea what tomorrow, or next year, or five years from now will bring, but I'm clear that a second passport is in perfect tune with my core.
I feel a little gratified that 12 year old me knew this day would come. And grateful that those I keep close know that to love me well is to set me free.