Letting love in – on my mother’s 80th birthday

Today is my mother’s 80th birthday.

My sister and I have been planning mom’s birthday celebration for months, organizing a reunion in Sicily.

My mother lives in Israel. She has moved there when she and my father split up roughly 12 years ago.

When we considered how to celebrate this milestone birthday we decided to meet outside of Israel, to make sure our plans were not affected by the war. We used Italian airlines to find connections that would allow my sister traveling from New York to meet with mom in Rome, so they could fly to Sicily together – where I would be waiting for them.

Last week we found out that all the non-El Al flights to and from Israel have been canceled for the month of October for safety reasons. Our mother could not fly out to meet with us to celebrate her 80th birthday.

We couldn’t have predicted this.

“How often do you usually see your mom?” someone asked me the other day, as I was sharing my frustration at this situation.

It took me a few moments to realize that in the last few years I would see my mother no more than once a year. Even though I lived in France and the flight to Israel was just over three hours long.

It was easy enough for me to see my mother in the last few years. I just did not prioritize seeing her.

Ever since her flights have been cancelled and it quickly became clear that we will not be able to find alternative tickets in the last moment to “fix” our plans, I’ve experienced more than frustration.

There’s a nagging thought: what if I never see her again?

And that thought elicits fear. As well as deep sadness. Maybe even grief.

In the last ten years of my journey to awareness I have come in contact with deep layers within me of anger toward my mother.

To feel anger was taboo for most of my life. But to feel it toward my mother – the person I was supposed to love and honor – was overwhelming, shameful too. I repressed it in my subconscious, where it festered, causing all sorts of problematic manifestations.

What emerged in the last few years that finally led me to connect to my anger was seeing how judgmental, critical and old-fashioned my mother was in her views and beliefs. I have been fighting her imprint on me for most of my life. I experienced her judgmental attitude as conditional love and that was painful. Her judgments felt like betrayals. I had to ask for periods with no communication between us.

Coming into contact with and allowing my anger felt cathartic. My body broke out in a rash while my whole being unleashed the poisonous emotions I’d suppressed for decades.

Today I no longer feel anger toward my mother.

This is recent, less than a year.

Letting all the suppressed emotions out helped me not only clear them from my body, but removed the judgmental filter from how I viewed her.

Last time I saw mom was in March of 2023.

The woman who greeted me was physically much shorter and slighter than I remembered her. She is certainly much less of an imposing, larger-than-life figure my inner child remembers her to be.

It helps when I relate to her not as her child, but an adult and myself a mother.

As a woman and a mother I understand the complexities of raising children while you carry your own pain and trauma.

I am learning to love everyone in my life by letting them be who they are, rather than demanding that they be who I need them to be for me to feel better.

I remind myself that as an adult, I don’t need my mother to be anyone other than who she is. Practicing re-parenting of my own inner child, I have been able to stop dehumanizing my mother as a need-fulfiller. I try to see her as a woman and a human, traumatized and messy like all of us.

And especially now, as I am so acutely aware of her age and these unexpected obstacles to see each other now – time together feels suddenly scarce and precious.

I am still processing the fear that I may never see her again.

It seems to have something to do with the need to express all that still needs to be said between us. At the same time, I consider just letting some things go. My emotions are mine to process. She cannot meet me where I am anyway – I have tried and it always lead to pain on both sides.

And while we are trying to find creative solutions to see each other in the next few months, I am very aware of the fact that some time sooner than later there will be no more options to see each other, regardless of political developments and airline companies’ decisions.

80 years old.

I don’t need to prove to her (and to myself) that she is wrong and I am right.

I don’t need to convince her that my vision of the world, of this horrific and senseless war, of how to mother children in the 21st century, of what it means to love is somehow better than hers.

I want to spend some time contemplating what I want to tell her before it may become too late.

Needless to say, the only words that matter today, the only words I want to tell her on her 80th birthday are these: “I love you. And I thank you for everything. Everything!”

And I mean it.