In Honour Of My Mumma

Honouring the Woman Who Brought Me Here

In honour of my Mumma Janie this Mother’s Day, I find myself reflecting on the woman who brought me into this world and the journey our relationship took over the years.

Mother’s Day touches something deep because motherhood isn’t just a role — it’s years of giving, protecting, worrying, sacrificing, loving.

It’s a journey that shapes lives in ways we don’t always fully understand until we’ve walked parts of it ourselves.

Today I find myself reflecting on my own mother.

Our relationship was not always easy. Like many mothers and daughters, there were wounds, misunderstandings, and years where love and pain sat side by side. There were moments where I longed for things I didn’t always receive, and times when the distance between us felt heavy.

But time and healing have a way of changing how we see the past.

As I’ve walked my own path of growth, I’ve come to realise that our parents were never given a manual for how to love us perfectly. They were living their own stories, carrying their own wounds, and doing the best they could with the awareness they had at the time.

My mother gave me life.

That alone is something sacred.

And through the years, she also gave me lessons — some gentle, some difficult — that helped shape the woman I am today. The strength I carry, the compassion I’ve learned, and the deep understanding I now have for healing all grew from the soil of those experiences.

Near the end of her life, something softened between us.

When I travelled back to Canada to be with her in her final days, the past seemed to fall away. In that moment, none of the old stories mattered. I was simply a daughter holding the hand of the woman who brought me into this world.

And what I felt most strongly in that space was compassion.

Not because everything had been perfect, but because life had given me the gift of understanding. I could see her as a whole human being, not just as the role she played in my life.

That moment allowed me to release things I had carried for many years.

Forgiveness, I’ve learned, isn’t about saying that what happened didn’t matter. It’s about freeing your heart from the weight of holding onto it.

And in doing that, love finds its way back in.

As I’ve walked my own healing journey, I’ve come to understand something else too. Every generation carries both love and wounds forward. Sometimes the work of healing isn’t about changing what came before us, but about becoming conscious enough to transform what we carry forward.

In that way, our parents give us more than just life. They give us the opportunity to grow beyond the patterns we inherited and to shape a different future with greater awareness and compassion.

Motherhood itself has taught me so much about that love. Becoming a mother showed me the depth of responsibility and care that comes with bringing another life into the world. It showed me how deeply we want to protect our children, how fiercely we hope to give them what we perhaps didn’t receive ourselves.

And it reminded me that every generation is learning.

Each of us is doing the best we can with the awareness we have at the time.

Sometimes the greatest honour we can give our parents is not pretending everything was perfect, but allowing compassion to replace resentment, and understanding to soften the places that once hurt.

Today I honour my mother not for being perfect, but for being part of the story that brought me here.

For the life she gave me.

For the lessons that shaped me.

For the strength that grew through the spaces that were difficult.

And for the love that, in the end, found its way back through forgiveness.

Wherever you are today — whether you are celebrating your mother, remembering her, grieving her, or navigating a complicated relationship — I hope you can meet this day with gentleness.

Because motherhood, like life itself, is rarely simple.

But it is always part of the story that shapes who we become.

Sometimes the greatest healing we can offer the generations before us is not rewriting the past, but choosing to meet it with understanding — and allowing that understanding to become the compassion that changes the generations after us.