Still Becoming

There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from loving someone deeply while also needing distance from them.

For most of my life, my mother battled anxiety and depression. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes loudly. And sometimes in ways that consumed everything around her. There were periods where the depression became so heavy that she would talk about wanting to die or being better off dead. As a child and later as an adult, I carried the weight of those words in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time.

I’ve had my own battles with anxiety and depression too. I know what it feels like to carry heaviness. To feel overwhelmed. To struggle. But there’s a difference between struggling and allowing the darkness to spill onto everyone around you.

Three years ago, one of my twins tried to take his own life.

He was only eight years old.

Even typing those words still feels impossible sometimes.

The method he used would not have worked. Logically, I know that. But as a mother, logic doesn’t erase the terror of finding yourself face to face with the reality that your child was hurting deeply enough to try. It changes you forever. It changes the way you hear certain words. The way you watch people around your children. The way your heart lives in a constant state of alertness afterward.

And suddenly things I had spent years tolerating no longer felt tolerable.

My mother would make comments about death and hopelessness in front of my son. Comments that maybe another adult could brush off, but not a child who had already struggled with thoughts no child should ever have to carry. I knew what it was doing to him. I saw the fear, the heaviness, the emotional confusion settling onto shoulders that were still so small.

And I had to make a choice.

A painful one.

I had to set boundaries.

Not because I didn’t love my mother.
Not because I wanted to punish her.
Not because I thought she was evil or malicious.

But because protecting my child had to come first.

For a long time, I felt guilty for that. I questioned myself constantly. Was I abandoning her? Was I being too harsh? Too sensitive? Too unforgiving?

But eventually I realized something important:

Boundaries are not betrayal.

Sometimes they are love in its most necessary form.

I think a lot of us were raised to believe that loving someone means enduring anything. Absorbing everything. Carrying every burden no matter the cost to ourselves. But motherhood taught me something different.

Love without boundaries can become destruction.

And protecting your peace — especially your child’s peace — is not cruelty.

It is responsibility.

I still loved my mother. I still grieved for her. I still understood that much of her pain came from wounds she never healed from herself. But understanding someone’s pain does not mean allowing it to consume the next generation.

Sometimes breaking cycles looks less dramatic than people imagine.

Sometimes it looks like uncomfortable conversations.
Sometimes it looks like distance.
Sometimes it looks like saying, “I love you, but this cannot continue.”

And sometimes the hardest thing a person will ever do is refuse to let their children inherit the weight they spent their own life carrying.