Hey there, family!
Welcome back to LifeWithLexisKai.com! Today’s post is straight from the heart, inspired by the holiday many commemorated yesterday – Mother’s Day.
Overall, I really enjoyed Mother’s Day this year. I owe a major part of that to Papa for taking the time and effort to celebrate me and pour into my cup. The weekend was much needed with the funk I’ve been in this week. But we can get into that another time.
This Mother’s Day was a bit different. Layered in ways I’m still processing.
Two Relationships. One Pattern.
For one, it’s my first Mother’s Day with my mom living with us. I would say our relationship dynamic is complex. Yet, it’s rather that I’m accepting that she may be a covert narcissist. Last year, around this time, we had just relocated to North Carolina, and as a surprise, I paid train fare for my mom to spend Mother’s Day with us. We didn’t have much at the time, not even dining room furniture, but Papa made us a wonderful dinner, and we sat and ate together on cardboard boxes.
This is also my first Mother’s Day since reconciling with my eldest daughter. In December 2024, she made some decisions that caused me to send her to live with relatives in Florida. This was our first time ever being apart for an extended period of time, and we spent the better part of six months no contact. Until early June, when she settled into our new home in NC. Since Mother’s Day ’25 had already passed during our rift, there was no mutual celebration then either.
Two very different relationships. But a similar pattern shared within each, one of misattunement, emotional neglect, and overall distance caused by a lack of emotional intelligence.
This was also my first Mother’s Day that I really didn’t feel like celebrating motherhood. On the contrary, I’ve been feeling trapped by the concept of it for the most part.
Programmed to Mother Before I Could Be a Person
For some context, I wasn’t raised by my mom. At the age of 18 months, the story goes, I decided I was to live with my mema, my paternal grandmother. And until I was 12, that’s what I did. My mom was what I would consider a weekend mom. I saw her on weekends, holidays, and sometimes during school breaks. But sometimes not at all. I remember there were times when I went weeks or months without seeing or hearing from her.
Because of this and other things, our relationship never really jelled. I never felt a real bond with my mom, but I always wanted to live with her. When I was brought to the doorstep of my intergenerational home, I thought my prayers had been answered. And for a while, they were. But there was one important detail: my mom was 7 months pregnant with my little brother.
Estranged and rebellious preteen who went from their own room to now sleeping on a couch moves back home with their flighty, alcoholic mother, who is now randomly pregnant. Sounds like the plot of a Lifetime Movie, right? And a lot of my life was. I joked for years that I didn’t watch reality TV because my real life had enough drama (I still don’t). Without repair, there’s no connection. Moving back with my mom didn’t heal my years of parental neglect. Add a newborn to the mix, and it was a recipe for my risky behavior and attention-seeking tendencies.
This is the same time Heaven’s dad enters the picture. Handsome and parentified, much like myself. We were unsupervised adolescents, both grown beyond our ages by experience and responsibility.
Raising babies was no mystery to me. My little sister, six years my junior, was my first child. I remember teaching her the alphabet and changing her diaper. My first cousin, who was born when I was just 10 years old, was my second. I had kept a baby on my hip ever since then—an omen for my life to come.
Thirteen and pregnant. Fourteen with a baby. Fifteen and a single mother navigating domestic violence.
It was programming me to be a mother before I could be a person.
The Suffering I Called Love
Fast forward to today, where I am a parent to a child the same age as I was at the time of her conception, which shows me my shortcomings. Not that it took 13 years for me to see flaws in the ways I was raising her, but even in the way I saw the role of mother at all. Self-sacrifice was what I thought motherhood was about then. For years, I thought it was about how much I could suffer to give my kids the life I never had.
And I did for years. Four years of college and three years in the classroom as a middle school teacher, I struggled “for my kids”. To give them a better quality of life, and the mother I never had. Making sure they got the love and attention I never received.
Then I realized that’s just trauma talking. Because why would I have to suffer just for bringing life into this world? Hadn’t I suffered enough? More than anything, you can’t give someone else what you don’t have. I had been running on empty and calling it devotion.
What I Did Instead
So this Mother’s Day, I didn’t spend it thinking about all that I do for my kids. Or all that my mother didn’t do for me. Or how I became a mother without ever having one for myself. Or how my kids are my why and all that other shit.
I spent it appreciating myself, as an extension of the Great Mother. The Earth, whose womb we all bore from, and to whose bosom we shall return, is the first and only home we’ll ever know. During the hardest nights of both motherhood and childhood, it was the Great Mother who comforted me, whether I knew it or not. She guided me to safety and to refuge.
And now, finally, I can stop and smell the roses.
Not because everything is resolved. Not because my relationships are repaired or the patterns are broken. But because I am no longer waiting for permission to be celebrated. I am the source. And the source deserves a day too.
If this post found you, it was meant to.
The mother-daughter story is one of the most complicated ones we carry — especially when the woman who was supposed to show you how to be loved was still figuring that out herself. If something here stirred something in you, I’d love to hear it. Drop a comment below, or come find me on Instagram @alexxiskai. You don’t have to have it figured out to show up in this space. That’s kind of the whole point.
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