It snuck up on me like a spider in the night, its sticky web attaching to me as I breathed. I made a decision I needed to grieve. A big decision. An earthshattering one.
I let go of a dream so that a new one could appear.
It felt deeper than that, though. Darker. Like that web had entangled my soul. Saying the words out loud broke upon the floodgates and sobs racked my body. But when I finally calmed down to get on with my day, a question struck me:
Was it my dream I was grieving or something else?
My mom died in 2023. Her death was sudden and yet it wasn’t. She’d spent years, decades, in and out of hospitals touching death’s door either by her own choices or her body’s by proxy.
Sometimes, most times if I’m honest, I forget she died. We rarely talked, had a relationship cobbled out of the grit of my teeth and the love of cooking and not much else. I still have some of the almost daily recipes she sent my way, but I threw most of them away. Deleted from my inbox much like I deleted her from my life.
That sounds cruel, even to me, the one who made the decision to do so. But I’m also the one who needed to do that to survive my mom. I spent those same decades she danced at death’s door surviving her. I was determined she wouldn’t pull me under or shatter my carefully constructed walls designed to keep her pain out and mine in.
My mom wasn’t my best friend, my confidante, my safe harbor. She was the person and pain I was running from.
In 2021, I published my first book. I’d always wanted to be a writer and I decided to test that driving want by digging in and getting it done. Holding my words in my hands felt life-changing. Amazing. Awesome in the standing-on-the-edge-of-the-Grand-Canyon sort of way.
I wanted more, needed more, so I threw myself into it and followed all the advice. The overwhelming deluge of advice. Rapid release. Write to market. Stay in your lane. Build your backlist. Build your socials. Build your following.
I tried all the things, my desperation driving me forward, and got nowhere. Oh, I wrote all the words, started multiple series, worked out worlds and characters and stories. But somewhere along the way, I stopped having fun. I stopped enjoying it. I stopped feeling the bliss and started feeling the pressure.
So I stopped. Stopped posting on social media, stopped writing, stopped creating.
And slowly, overtime, as the muse called to me, I picked up my pen and crafted stories. Built little worlds, little characters, little moments of joy.
Deep inside, though, my old dream festered. The pressure would spike from a small story into a fevered need to plan my year, my quarter, my months, my days. A five year plan with multiple books. A two-year plan with multiple published series. Until I realized that dream had died and I just hadn’t accepted it yet.
My mom’s birthday is on Monday. I hadn’t forgotten it like I forgot her death, but that’s because it’s hard to forget for many reasons. It falls on Cinco de Mayo and somewhere near Mother’s Day in the US. It is the second of five immediate family birthdays, including mine, within a three week span. And, it is three weeks away from my wedding anniversary. In short, May is a loaded month of family ties and memories.
I decided five days ago to let my dream die. As I grieved it, as I cried, my mom’s death crept in. Another birthday without her. Another year where I don’t steel myself to call her. And I wondered as I muffled my sobs in a towel whether my tears were for her, or for me, or for both of us stuck in an emotional web of our own making.
In the end it didn’t matter. Both events required grieving, even if one seemed much less important than the other.
I’ll leave it to you to determine which one that is, because they are too layered, too connected, for me to do so. That may seem cold or uncaring, and my mom certainly had no qualms about calling me both at times throughout our relationship, but it is what it is.
I survived my mom, and I survived killing my dream. But at a cost greater than I expected to pay. Time will tell if it was worth it.