It has been 3 months since I picked up Kaya from her residential treatment center. The experience of her absence, along with Matthew’s, was a true aloneness, for perhaps the first time in my entire life. A different quiet that many know following deaths or losses or empty nests. It wasn’t bad, it was just different. And it wasn’t until Kaya came home that I realized the impact of the previous 2 years of Kaya’s struggle…on me.

As a mother, spiritual seeker, controller, and problem solver, I had not taken a breath to stop and feel how scared and worried and on guard I was all the time. While our home had become the house of avoidance by all, my avoidance was in trying to fix and manage and prevent my family from experiencing their own pain, struggles, and the results of their own choices.

As a parent, I think it started the day Kaya’s dad died. I decided that she should not have to experience any more pain. So, I made all my decisions around trying to keep her safe from the pains of life. I have since learned that most of us with children spend our lives trying to keep them safe. And beyond about age 3, we can’t. In so doing, we become completely co-dependent, and the result is often broken relationships. We focus on behaviors and trying to control our kids instead of prioritizing the relationship above all else, so that trust is a foundation to support life’s ups and downs.

As a love partner, the lingering remnants of childhood troubles resurfaced as I stopped taking care of myself so that I could once again try to “make someone else be happy”. With themselves, with their relationships, and with me. The magnitude of how lost I had become did not truly come into view until these last few months. I have had incredible support from unconditionally loving friends, my spiritual program, a life-changing parenting coach that was provided as a part of Kaya’s treatment program, and a therapist. It takes what it takes.

With all that support, it has still been perhaps the deepest and at times, darkest, passage of my life. Somehow, through it all, I was given the courage and the willingness to allow the deep grief, fear, and pain to keep moving through me like stormy waves in the ocean. And through losing everything I thought I had, and letting go of everything I thought I knew, space was created to learn, and grow, and become a better version of myself and a more present and trustworthy parent than I had been. And I was once again reminded that I receive and trust everything taken care of – when I totally let go and surrender.

My relationship with Kaya is healing, day-by-day. She is regaining my trust with patience and intention. She understands how difficult this last year has been for me, and she understands that regaining trust will come slowly. I am regaining her trust by believing in her (when she struggles to believe in herself), expressing how proud I am of who she is (not at all tied to what she accomplishes), and most importantly, staying in my own lane, focusing on taking care of myself and letting go of trying to influence or control her path. Easy? Hell No!! But it seems to be a recipe for more peace and ease for both of us. And I am so grateful to have a relationship again with the daughter that I knew before life took her off the rails.

Often, life feels like being on a hamster wheel. How many times do we have to learn the same lessons of the past. Recently a dear and wise friend told me that while the effort seems redundant and repetitive, it is not. This isn’t like every other time in my past because I’m a completely different person this time around. It is true. Our awareness and perspective change as we grow older. At least there is one upside to aging!

Today, my heart if full of gratitude. While the struggles of life are painful and frightening and seemingly unending, I recognize that they are just natural cycles. I believe that the struggles of the life I have been given are like the waters that carve out the canyons for thousands and thousands of years. As I’ve allowed the struggles, the feelings, the tears, the grief, the pain, all of it…there are new, deeper more beautiful layers of my canyon visible and accessible and one way or another, there will be some use in it all. I have faith that there is some higher order, something positive that is possible, that was not available to me and therefore not available for me to share or to give away before now.

As I rest in the mystery and wonder, and even a little bit of excitement about the future and what I don’t know, I am grateful and today, I hope that my light will shine a bit brighter in service and in love.