During our journey, as we can call it, you gained certain insights, you started to see things differently and you received new inspirations. As a result, you are making a shift. A shift in yourself, resulting in different behavior and therefore change. Perhaps you will relapse or you will still suffer from behavior of your environment that has NOT YET changed. It is now a matter of persevering and staying focused.

Forgiveness is an important theme when doing a shift. I have noticed that it is quite a difficult theme for everyone. When you forgive, you let go and you do not know where you will end up. As crazy as it sounds, holding on to feelings that have been with you for a long time is familiar territory. It keeps you in your place and it keeps other people in their place. But there is no growth there.

How do you start? I'll share a bit of my own process with you.

At some point I forgave my mother for never letting me get close, there was always distance. Physically and mentally. I also can't remember us doing anything fun together or her only coming to me when I lived on my own. From the age of 35 there was real distance because we didn't see each other anymore. I tried a few more times to let the love between us blossom, but I never succeeded and yet I feel love for her. The lack of her love for me has not been able to stop my heart from believing in love and sharing love. That is why it is so important to work on yourself, because then change can occur. Of course I have had a lot of sadness in the whole process and my heart has been hit hard. However, life is too beautiful to get stuck in it and other people are too important to share love with.

By the way, forgiveness is a process that will keep coming back. Every time new parts of this process pass by. Can I blame my mother? That is a question that still occupies me, she also received little love from her mother and had to deal with more people than just me, people with whom I did not have good contact and who influenced our contact, which is why I can understand some of her choices. But does that make up for the lack of motherly love? I can only keep looking at what I need or have had when I look at our history. I could have used her support and closeness. What the loss has taught me is how you as an older woman can support younger women. She had more life experience and knew what I still had to go through. She had already gone through all the phases that you encounter in life and every time I entered a new phase I felt that loss again. So this piece is not finished yet, not everything has been forgiven. It has made me very aware of how I, as a mother, but also as a mother-in-law, can be of support and hopefully my sons and daughters-in-law feel that.

The path of forgiveness is a complex puzzle that you have to consciously solve pieces of so that future generations will no longer suffer from it. Can you see what the common thread is in your (fore)mother line? What has influenced you as a mother or still influences you and what requires awareness and forgiveness?