It Wasn’t Complicated After All

My son is spending Christmas away for the first time.
Twenty-nine years of shared rituals, and now a quiet change.

I didn’t have an issue with him going. That part felt clean.

What hurt was something else.

I wasn’t held in mind.

Plans were made — with friends, with travel, with what came next — and somehow I wasn’t part of the orientation. When dates were offered later, they landed flat. January 25 didn’t feel like a celebration. It felt like a placeholder.

The meaning that came immediately was familiar:
I don’t matter. I’m not a priority.

What I didn’t expect was the intensity of the emotional pain.

It wasn’t mild.
It wasn’t passing.

It felt like a train wreck inside me — and I was walking through it slowly, picking out pieces of shrapnel one by one. Sharp thoughts. Old conclusions. Half-formed stories lodged in the body.

As I stayed with it, I watched my mind do what minds do when pain feels unbearable. It went to anger. It went to withdrawal. It went to self-protection.

Thoughts arose about writing him off.
Not calling.
Creating distance.
Even returning his gift.

I could see these thoughts clearly — and I also saw what they were trying to do.

They were trying to pull me out of my heart.

Every time that kind of thinking appeared, I could feel the impulse underneath it:
I don’t want to sit here with this pain.

And still, I stayed.

I didn’t act on the thoughts.
I didn’t judge them.
I didn’t make them wrong.

I just kept noticing that they arose when the pain felt most raw.

It took me twelve hours.

What eventually became clear was that the pain wasn’t actually saying I don’t matter.

It was pointing to something quieter and more intimate:

I don’t think my feelings matter.

That recognition changed everything.

I also began to see how much of the pain was shaped by the role I was standing in — mother at Christmas — and the meaning I was giving that role. If this had been a friend, or another human being in my life, I likely wouldn’t have felt the same charge. And because it was Christmas, there was extra pressure, extra symbolism, extra weight layered on top.

Seeing this didn’t invalidate the pain.
It softened it.

I spoke to my son and named the hurt — not to change him, not to get reassurance, not to make it right — but because it was true. And then something unexpected happened.

I let it go.

Not in a dismissive way.
Not in a “rise above it” way.

I let it go because I realized something very simple:

What mattered was how I felt.

They were my feelings.
I needed to have them.
I needed to honor them.
I needed to share them.

He didn’t need to fix them.

And beneath all of it, something even simpler became clear:

I love my son. And that is the only thing that truly matters.

That love didn’t disappear because plans changed.
It didn’t require a perfect holiday container to be real.

At the same time, I don’t believe we live in isolation.

We impact each other.

I think of it like swimming laps in a shared lane. How I enter the water affects the people already there. My pace, my awareness, my presence — it all ripples outward. I’m not responsible for managing their experience, but I’m not invisible either.

It’s the same in relationships.

We are not ultimately responsible for each other’s feelings — but we do affect one another. Awareness matters. Consideration matters. Being held in mind matters.

And still, each of us has to be able to hold our own inner world.

This time, I didn’t abandon mine.

I stayed with the pain long enough to see that the anger, the withdrawal, the cutting-off thoughts weren’t truth — they were protection. And when the pain was honored instead of avoided, the meaning loosened on its own.

There was no villain.
There was no failure.
There was no lesson to extract.

Just a moment of intense grief.
A moment of transition.
A moment of honesty.
A moment of love.

And then — relief.

Not relief because it worked out.
Relief because I didn’t leave myself.

It turns out it really is that simple.

Feel what you feel.
Notice when the mind tries to pull you away from it.
Stay with your heart anyway.

And remember — we matter to each other, even as we learn to let our own feelings matter first.