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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi there, ladies. Welcome back to The Tamsen Show. So Mother's Day is this weekend, and it made me think that we should talk about it for a little bit before it actually gets here. So I know that for a lot of women, Sunday is not a simple day, myself included. The world makes it look like it should be.
There's brunches, there's flowers, there's cards, there's posts everywhere of women with their moms calling them their best friends. If that is not your reality, if your mom is gone or if your relationship with her is painful or complicated or non-existent, you can feel incredibly alone in the middle of all this.
Chapter 2: Why is Mother's Day difficult for some people?
Like everyone else got something that you didn't. So I really felt it was important to talk about this. And we've talked a lot about moms and we've talked about grief on this show, but I just felt like with Mother's Day around the corner, sometimes I don't sit with it all the time and I just try to get through it and not think about it.
But I don't know, this year, maybe I'm getting older, I don't know. So I lost my mom when I was 20. And there are women listening to this right now whose mother is alive, but who grieve her just as much as I grieve mine who's gone because maybe she was never really there or because a relationship caused more hurt than it ever gave comfort.
Or maybe you've had to create a distance just to take care of yourself. Whatever it is, I know grief is real and that grief counts. And there's no ceremony for it, which can make it even harder to carry. So this episode is one for all of us.
I wanna share what I've learned over the years about grief, about loss, about finding your way through a day when the world tells you you should be feeling one way, but you feel completely different. So pull up a chair, maybe you're going for a walk, whatever it is, we're gonna sit together with this for a little bit. Again, my mom died when I was 20 years old from breast cancer.
It came back very aggressively after years of her being treated, after two mastectomies, it metabolized to her liver and her lungs and it moved fast. As a family, it was my mom, my dad, my brother, my younger brother, myself. We had just relocated to Tampa, four of us, brand new city, still getting our footing.
We were actually in a temporary apartment trying to figure out where we were gonna live. And within the second month of us being there, she relapsed. And before we could even understand what was happening and what was going on, she was diagnosed again, and then she was gone. And she passed away the day after Christmas.
She was basically sick all that Christmas day, and by that night, incoherent, and passed away the next morning, December 26th. My brother was 16. I had just turned 20. And my dad and my brother and I were suddenly the three of us in a city where we barely knew anybody planning my mom's funeral. I spent the last 35 years doing everything without her.
My first job, my first apartment, my wedding, my first one and my second one, my divorce, which she, of course, never knew about, finding Ira, who I think she would love, who she never got to meet, writing a book, going through menopause, which, and this is something I think about a lot, she never got to warn me about, talk to me about, never got to tell me what it was like for her.
I don't even know if she knew what she went through because she went through it due to cancer. and chemotherapy. That intergenerational conversation that most women get to have with their moms, the ones where you realize, oh, that is what's happening or that's what's going to happen. I never got that like a lot of women. I went through the whole thing without her roadmap of life.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Tamsen share about her experience with grief?
But it doesn't work like that. One day I will be in a grocery store even now and a song will come on and it will undo things like all these years later. And I'll think, what is going on? What is going on with me? I already, I already got through that. I already went through that. Nothing is wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with you. Grief moves more like an ocean than it does a calendar.
It ebbs and flows. It can go real calm and quiet for stretches. And then a wave comes and knocks you out flat. It's not a sign you're not healing. That's just kind of how this works. And anybody that tells you it doesn't maybe hasn't been through this. The second thing, we don't just move on. I really believe we move forward.
And I've watched not just with my mom, but with my dad losing two wives in his lifetime. We move forward. Those two things sound similar, but they're actually completely different. Moving on implies leaving her behind, like, okay, chapter closed, what's next? Moving forward allows you to know you're gonna carry that person with you into every new thing.
So my mom doesn't get smaller as my life gets bigger. She comes with me and I think about her at every significant moment. Like she is there, just not how I would love her to be. The third thing, and this is one that I have leaned on. I want you to say her name, talk about her, tell the stories. As long as you're speaking her name and sharing who she was,
you are keeping something alive that does not have to die just because she did. And you don't have to let go of that love in order to make room for new love too. All those things coexist. They really do. And I feel like I've become living proof of that now. I could never have seen that at 20 or 25 or 30. Like I was... I just couldn't have seen it.
I actually tried to ignore that pain and cover it up with other things. And it wasn't until I really worked through it and I worked through it with a therapist and I've done some different things to really understand all that and not feel so angry. Grief and happiness can live in the same house.
And it's interesting, Wendy Suzuki, a neuroscientist who has been on the show, said this to me, and I never forgot this. She lost her father and her brother within months of each other. I cannot even imagine. And she said that what she realized through the grief was that she couldn't feel that depth of pain without there having been that depth of love. Think about that.
You couldn't feel the depth of pain without there being the depth of that love. And she said when she finally understood that, that the grief was just the love with nowhere to go, she exhaled. And I have to tell you, when she said that, I thought about it all weekend after she left the show. We recorded the show and I'm like... Oh my gosh, no one's ever said that to me before.
I've never even thought of something like that. So maybe you're in a lot of pain right now. Maybe you had your mom for a long time, but she passed recently and this is your first Mother's Day without her. And my arms are around you if that's the case. But I want you to know, if you're in a lot of pain, it's because you loved a lot. That's not a wound.
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Chapter 4: How does grief change shape over time?
And I hope this helped in some small way. And I will see you next time.