My First Broken Heart (And it Wasn’t a Lover)

She came into my life when I was 12 years old and needed a woman, someone to confide in as I navigated puberty, middle school drama, and just life in a house full of boys. I was relieved and intrigued. Fit, fun, and willing to jump right in, she moved in with us after two months and became the primary female in my life. She married my father, gave birth to my sister, taught me how to run, introduced me to good lip stick, meditation, and metaphysics. She became the mother I never had. I looked up to her, compared myself to her, and confided in her. We were a family. She wasn’t easy and the lessons I learned were experiential. She taught me to trust my intuition but gaslit me every time I tried to share my feelings. She taught me about boundaries, by walking all over them. Some days she was friendly, some days she wouldn’t speak to me, you never knew which version of her you were going to get. And while she burned down almost all her relationships (literally like stopped talking to her entire family),  I was proud to be someone she could count on, someone who understood the deep soul level healing she purported to be doing.   

‍

I grew up and moved away. I matured and learned communication skills. When I turned 27, I was proud and believed that we got to the other side of the difficult years; we’d made our relationship our own. I was considering calling her “Ma.” I got a tattoo to represent the women in my life, 3 birds: a mother lost, a mother found and a sister made. Just as I was leaning in, she was pulling away. Days, weeks and then months passed and I finally got up the courage to ask her why. I remember the conversation as if it has been crystalized in time. I stood in my living room on the phone, finally asking her why I felt this space between us and her answer was like a dagger to my heart. “I’ve ended my contract with your mother….I am not going to do this anymore,” she said. Do what anymore? The answer took several seconds to land. Oh. She no longer wanted to be a mother to me.

‍

Fucking ouch. My heart hurt. My world felt as if it had been flipped upside down. For the next several months, I would often wake up in the middle of the night, tears streaking down my cheeks and thoughts of her consuming me. I would come home to visit and it felt like I didn’t know how to act or what she wanted from me. When I moved back to Portland later that year she made a point to tell me that she had nothing to give me…that my father and my sister were all she had “any gas in the tank for.” I ended up sleeping on a friend’s couch for two months until I found a place to live because I wasn’t welcome in my childhood home. I was so angry and so hurt, my heart was bleeding.  

‍

With time, my edges became less jagged and my thoughts became more clear. I began to examine all the ways that I had abandoned myself, bent my boundaries, gave up my power all in the name of connecting with her. My relationship with my father was something that she was jealous of and my relationship with my sister was something she was threatened by. My life decisions were seen as “violations” to her, my important relationships were not only unvalued but actively ignored. My desire to be wanted, loved, and accepted by her made me permissive of all the ways in which she was conditional and cruel. It took me a long time to let her go. When I finally did, I realized that her breaking my heart was a gift. I didn’t want to feel constantly hurt or never good enough anymore. Mending my broken heart gave me the opportunity to know my capacity to feel love again, to be proud of my ability to self reflect, to trust my intuition, to be conscious of how I build relationships, to be deeply curious about attachment theory and to be my own solid foundation. I ain’t gonna lie, it’s taken me years, but that’s okay too. I am sympathetic as to why she did what she did, but I don’t forgive it, I won’t forget it, and I am so very thankful for the lessons I’ve learned and the skills I have gained. I know now that I am the only person who can hold that little girl who lost her mother and she found her home in me.

‍

‍

‍

Abby is an intuitive bodyworker, and Licensed Massage Therapist, from a family of storytellers. She is drawn to the essence-of a story, of a belief, of all that we are and how that is expressed through our human experience. Learn more about her bodywork at https://www.attunebodywork.com.

‍