Tracking My Healing Concerning Mother's Day (2026)

 My mother and I didn't get an ideal start – a story that even includes a literal miracle, but it wasn't enough to compensate for the heartache that my parents carried, long before I came around. Parents full of love fill the hearts of their children with the abundance of that love, but mine also had an abundance of shame and fear. I soon became their scapegoat, and in this very truncated, oversimplified rendition of this longer story of unrequited love, they eventually washed their hands of me. 

In 2007, when I first read Francine Shapiro's EMDR book, an early scene from her work as a therapist came to life in my mind. She described a young child who created many things as she played, then promptly destroyed each one in self-disgust, calling each “no good.” I saw myself as a tiny little girl, full of frustration and self-hatred,, trapped alive in a deep shoebox. 

I ran from corner to corner of the box for years of my life, growing from infant to toddler to school-age child. Looking up and holding up my invisible accomplishments, I saw myself reach and cry out to my parents, hoping to finally find something good enough that they would embrace with joy and the pride of parental love. All was “no good.”

When I asked myself whether I had just forgotten good moments of praise, I recalled one day as a teen when I asked my mother directly why nothing was ever good enough for her. My mother said harshly, “What? Do you want me to light a candle and have a moment of silence?”

 Later in my adulthood, as her disdain for me grew, she started rewriting the past of my wonderful accomplishments as utter failures and causes for shame. Some, she denied altogether, claiming they never existed. Still looking into that box in my mind in which I was still trapped, and still feeling like a rejected, unlovable child, I watched myself lay down in the center of it. I could no longer fight the sense of futility.

As Mother's Day in 2016 approached, experiences I had with some others stirred up those feelings of desire for love and acceptance. How I wished that someone would joyfully lift me out of that box to embrace me! I felt driven to “get the image out of my head.”   "Out of my body."  As I tried to envision what it might look like, I ended up with a foam board and digital mockup that became it's own multi-media image of what I saw that day when I read Shapiro's book. It was accepted into an art exhibit, and I included a statement about all the similar but different boxes I'd been placed in, never really getting out of that original box.  My religious experience was indistinguishable from the personal, and all of it became reinforced webbing of spiritual bypassing and blackmail.

In 2025, someone inspired by Aleksander Małachowski's photo of a Japanese cherry tree turned it into a Mother's Day meme. The grand tree and its burgeoning branches, which towered over a young girl, were identified as her mother, showering her with the blossoms of goodness that a mother bestows on her children. I wept terribly when I saw it, but I worked to come to terms with it. I sought an alternative image to replace the old one in my mind's eye. 

Aleksander Małachowski's photograph
of a Kanzan variety of Prunus serrulata (Japanese Flowering Cherry);
Mokotów District in Warsaw, Poland (just near Izumi Sushi in Biały Kamień)

Some days, I still wake up in that deep shoebox, but I understand that this is the nature of emotional healing. It is not a linear process, but it's one that walks us through parts of our painful past as life takes our healing to a new and deeper level. We are more like onions, and reckoning with our past pain in new times of healing becomes the peeling of a deeper onion layer, complete with tender, tearing eyes. I've learned to trust this as a normal, needed part of the process.

So a year ago, I decided to make my own, healthier image, more in line with the greater picture of a loving Creator. This effort didn't invalidate my original image, but I allowed the challenge of the new image to open my heart and understanding. I adapted the image by duplicating the little girl, placing her near the original girl, each in their own world – one representing my mother and one for me, for I look so much like her.

I relabelled the glorious tree in full bloom as the Love of God. And in the interim between the two, I added some pink blossoms to the original image of me in the box, acknowledging the many blessings that I could never number that my mother did share with me. I know they came at great cost to her, not only because of limited resources, but also because she had so little love for herself that there was far less to share with me.

When I created that original image in 2016, so much of the pain I always felt on Mother's Day dropped away. This year, 2026, was the first year in a decade that I felt the familiar pain again, reminded of it by so many beloved Christian friends who have distanced themselves or disavowed me because of politics. “It's not good enough!” I'm no longer good enough. I even had the idea that, though I'm still a conservative libertarian, my die-hard Democrat, born again parents might be proud of me, just once, for rejecting Donald Trump's madness. And then, I laughed. They made up their mind about me when I was in my cradle.

When I sought out the images from a year ago to draw comfort from them, asking God to change and renew my heart and mind yet again, I could feel the change of growth. I added more cherry petals to my original image. 

And because of greater self-differentiation, I realized that I am not my mother, so the duplicate image of her I had created to represent myself needed to change. I added my long, lighter hair with a white strand now tinted purple. I gave myself a pink dress, too. We're individual, wonderful creations of God; connected and joined; yet very different, separate, and separated. Both of us are abundantly blessed, overshadowed by the burgeoning, budding branches of plenty of God's providence and love.

I wonder what I will see in these images in the years to come, if I am graced to have them.