A Mother’s Reflection on Power and Love

The Power to Love - Even When It’s Late

May 11, 2025

pink flower — Photo by Tirza van Dijk on Unsplash

I am driving my son to his last day of English 101 at the local community college. It’s the first college course he’s taken, as a dual-enrollment home-school student. I’m beaming with joy to be witnessing this hard-won full-circle moment of completion when he says "you want to hear the song I want to have played at my funeral?" He didn't even know that I recently started my own funeral playlist (which you can read about here). I hand him my phone so he can play the song, ‘Earthmover' by Have a Nice Life, and he explains that the reason he likes it so much is because even amongst the discordant and heavy parts of the song, there is a light piano accompaniment in the background that, to him represents hope even in the midst of moments of powerlessness, like death and writing research papers.

I tell my son that I will make a playlist for him too, and he says, “you know that means I’m dying before you, right?” I’m hoping that Spotify won’t even be a thing anymore by that time, and he wants to know what I have against the app. Nothing, I say - it’s just that technology is always evolving and we can’t really know how things will be that far into the future. I never saw this (gestures to iPhone) coming. “Yeah," he says, I spent a lot of time figuring out life on YouTube while you were in your room with the door closed.” I know this is true. He says, “it’s fine though - because I love you.” We’ve had many talks like this, a fine balance between validating his experience while also allowing space for the larger story to emerge, in its own right time.

As a young single mom of one, in an age where hand-held devices were clunky car phones and not every home had a computer, my daughter and I would walk hand in hand from the laundromat to a nearby park, where the only way I knew when it was time to walk back and switch loads was by looking at the analog watch on my wrist. Our days were filled with drives to my grandparents’ home, where she would stay while I drove to work, to school and back again to her, all the while New Order’s “Substance” and the other CD’s I got for a penny from BMG Music created the playlist of our lives. The most screen-time we had then was watching Mary Kate & Ashley tapes that played on our 13" tv/vcr combo, and the Billy Blanks Tae Bo workouts I’d do in the morning before she was up for the day. As a new relationship came into my life, so did bigger screens, and the hopes of creating a life that would be secure and loving. And for a while, it seemed as though it was.

My son asks why I didn’t give him the genes to help him concentrate, or to be able to do the things he wants to do. He knows he has a problem with screen use, and his mantra that “I was raised by three parents: mom, dad and YouTube" makes my heart sink as I think of all the ways I tried, and failed, to preserve a sense of connection and innocence within my family amidst the growing cultural shift of a screen in every hand. Now I see how the introduction of video games, more computers and bigger screens was a sign not of progress, but my powerlessness to keep them from taking the place of the kind of connection I wanted to nurture.

My second round of motherhood began when my daughter was nine. The arrival of my two boys, born two years apart, was foretold in 2001 during my first reiki session with a woman who worked in the same office as me, just months before I met their father. At the time I told her there was NO WAY that could be true, affirming my mantra that it was ‘me and my girl against the world.’ I had been devoting myself to the hard and worthy work of reclaiming a sense of stability and well-being after two difficult relationship experiences, both of which left the kind of marks on me and my daughter that take time, patience and great care to come to terms with. I was re-discovering a sense of empowerment, one Tae Bo kick at the imaginary face of those who had hurt us at a time, and it was working!

No one could have told me then that I would not only relinquish that freshly found place of power within me, and that what took its place would nearly kill me, but there were clues. One early warning came from a co-worker and friend who was also a psychiatrist. His alarm at my glowing claims that “we never fight…about anything!” was like a wet blanket on my 2-year relationship that was heading toward marriage and a baby. But the years between the powerful kicks at my past and walks in the park had been hard on me, with the medication I was taking for major depression and widespread body pain dulling not just the symptoms, but also my sense of self and vitality. There was something else too, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and was too exhausted with a difficult pregnancy to figure out.

I knew that the conditions in my growing family were not totally healthy, and I worked so hard to fix them - to fix myself. I placed all of my will into fixing everything and everyone and getting us all ‘on the same page’ became my new mantra. I found the book “Parenting the Strong-Willed Child,” during a visit to Barnes and Noble with my mom, who expressed her own sense of powerlessness to help me navigate the mounting difficulties at home. As I drew more educational resources into my life that helped me make sense of what was happening, I wanted to share what I was learning. The reception of these ideas from my husband and his family was lukewarm at best, and often my ideas fell flat in the space between us, gasping for air in the same way I would, alone behind closed doors, the only time I felt safe to let those sobs shake, quake and cleanse what I was carrying. I began to assume that there must be something wrong - really wrong - with ME.

After many years of feeling like an outcast in my home and isolated from friends, I was blessed with the opportunity to share my experiences and reflections in a women’s group, where I was met with compassion and concern. Those monthly moments of a healthier version of togetherness helped me to put more of the pieces of my life and myself together and, while those women didn’t always know what to do to support me, they didn’t look away. It took over a decade of trying to find any possible way to honor my vow to stay in my marriage, but as more of my internal power returned, it was painfully obvious that this version of me wasn’t welcome in the life my husband and I had created together.

During this tender time, I turned to another female friend, a leader of sorts in a larger spiritual community group. For years we would commiserate about the angst, confusion, and dissatisfaction we were both feeling in our lives. But when I finally began to rise from the ashes that had been choking me for so long, she lashed out. My steps toward freedom stirred something in her she wasn’t ready to face. Instead of holding space, she struck back with twisted stories and misplaced accusations.

It was in these fractured pieces of my relationships that I began to see power and powerlessness in a new light. There in the shards of my life I heard the old mantra, 'misery loves company,' revealing itself not as comfort, but as a trap - one that keeps us cycling within our suffering instead of using it as fuel to recreate ourselves.

I am thinking a lot about power these days as Pluto, the planet of sex, death, taxes, transformation and POWER has pressed pause and rewind on its moody playlist. A recent post I saw about “women’s empowerment” sparked another lively internal round of review about how what might appear to be empowering isn’t always, and that which feels disempowering is sometimes the bumpy on-ramp to an embodied sense of the truest power we possess, love.

In 2011, my dad opened the garage door to the home he and my mom shared to find her unresponsive in a car that had been running long enough to almost end her life. His response was anger - the one he was most familiar with - the one that masked everything he felt but couldn’t find the words to express. This was just a few years after a heated exchange that I initiated about his habitual harsh tone and over-correction. It had been that way with me, my mom and even my daughter, but I had finally reached a place within myself where I could finally express what I’d been thinking for so long. “If you continue to yell at my boys for little things, we just won’t visit anymore,” I said through tears and a red face he couldn’t see over the phone. Standing up to him that way initiated a slow but steady change in the way my dad and I interacted; one that continued to evolve after his unexpected divorce and relocation - a rupture that, in hindsight, opened space for the kind of real communication my parents couldn’t find while still married.

I remember sitting across from him at Red Lobster as he told me how sorry he was for all the stupid mistakes he made as a father. I reached across the table for his hands, reassuring him that even though there were difficult times in the past, that I loved him then AND now. This was a message that was hard for him to swallow, and one I would repeat often over the next four years until esophageal cancer made it hard for him to swallow anything at all. I am reminded now, as my son tells me that even though he felt like I’d left him and his brother alone too often, with screens as the 3rd parent to learn about life, that he still loves me ‘now’. I am here, swirling in the midst of all that I want to do that is too much to do in the waking hours of one life and I see that the long journey of restoring power to my own heart has found its way to restoring a sense of hope within my family, too.

Hope that love can still reach us, even if it arrives late.

Hope that healing is less about fixing the past, and more about being available in the present.

Hope that even when we fall short, the power to love -and be loved - remains.

This power is mine and it is yours, and it has always been there waiting to be remembered, at just the right time.

This song, by Sleeping at Last, points to the worry of motherhood and those places within us that make it hard to experience the fullness of love.

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