Coaching Your Family Relationships
Is your relationship with your adult child strained, distant, or heading toward estrangement?
Do you replay conversations, walk on eggshells, or wonder what you did wrong?
Are you dealing with family conflict, difficult adult children, or toxic in-laws — and feeling powerless to fix it?
You’re not alone.
I’m Tina Gosney, Family Conflict Coach and Family Life Educator. I help parents move from anxiety, overfunctioning, and emotional reactivity to calm, confident connection — even when their adult child won’t change.
Grounded in Bowen Family Systems theory and nervous system science, this podcast will help you:
1. Understand why stress spreads through a family system
2. Recognize patterns like overfunctioning, fixing, triangles, and emotional cutoff
3. Stop walking on eggshells
4. Navigate adult child conflict without losing yourself
5. Repair strained relationships with your adult child in a healthy way
At the heart of this work is the Differentiated Connection Map — balancing two core needs in every family:
• Closeness and belonging
• Individuality and autonomy
Through my HEAL framework, you’ll learn how to:
Hold onto yourself
Engage with calm clarity
Allow space for difference
Lead with grounded love
You cannot control your adult child.
But you can change your position in the system.
And when one parent becomes steadier, the entire family shifts.
If you’re searching for how to repair your relationship with your adult child and reduce family conflict without losing yourself — you’re in the right place.
Coaching Your Family Relationships
When Mother's Day Isn't Happy: Naming the Grief No One Sees
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When Mother’s Day Isn’t Happy: Naming the Grief No One Sees
Mother’s Day is everywhere. Flowers at the grocery store, brunch photos, smiling cards, and you are doing your best to hold it together while something inside you feels heavy.
Maybe your adult child is distant. Maybe the relationship is strained. Maybe they will text, but it will not feel like connection. Maybe there is silence.
And the hardest part? You might not even feel like you are “allowed” to feel what you feel because your situation does not fit the neat version of Mother’s Day everyone expects.
In this episode, we talk about the quiet, complicated reality many mothers carry in May, and we give it the dignity it deserves.
What you’ll learn in this episode
- Why Mother’s Day grief can feel so isolating, especially when there is no “official” loss, but your heart knows something is missing
- The different types of Mother’s Day pain, and how to recognize your story without minimizing it
- How to hold love and disappointment at the same time without turning it into shame or self-blame
- What is really happening when your relationship with your child feels far away, even if you are still in contact
- A grounded way to move through Mother’s Day with more steadiness, self-respect, and emotional clarity
If you are navigating estrangement, tension, distance, role changes, or just an ache you cannot quite name, this conversation is for you.
Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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Connect with us:
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tinagosneycoaching/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinagosneycoaching
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.
I want you to picture something with me. Let's just imagine we're, you know, fast forwarding a few days from the release of this episode. We're at the second Sunday of May. We're going to wake up and just for a split second, you know, that moment before you're fully awake, you forget what day it is. And then that flicker of remembrance comes on, and you remember you reach for your phone, maybe, or maybe you don't even do that anymore. Maybe you stopped reaching for your phone a long time ago. And now you're not actually sure which one is worse, the reaching for the phone or this when you stopped reaching for the phone. Maybe you're dreading you have that family brunch that's coming up in a few hours, and you're dreading that you have to smile your way through it. Maybe you even don't even want to go. Maybe you're watching your friends get flowers. Maybe they're posting those pictures of them and their smiling kids so happy together on social media, or you're watching your neighbors' kids come over and all the cars parked in front of their house. And you're sitting there wondering what you did wrong or what life went wrong, what went wrong in your life, or whether the future that you imagined, you know, when you held your baby for the first time, or maybe even before that, you're wondering if it's ever gonna look like the life that you're actually living. So here's what I know about a woman that's listening to this podcast right now. You are not one story. You're not just one kind of hard. You're a mother and you're struggling in May, and the reason is specifically yours. It's very specific, it's real, and it's probably much more complicated than anyone in your life fully understands. So this episode is for all of you, not just the mothers out there who have kids that have cut off contact, but all of you that are navigating really difficult relationships with your adult children, the ones that are alive and present but still feel really far away, the ones that are watching their children choose lives that broke the picture that they had for 20 years of what their life was supposed to look like, the mothers whose role has shifted because their child's life has changed and no one prepared them for how hard that was going to be. Today we're gonna start naming some of what you're carrying. And we're gonna give it the dignity that it deserves because it deserves dignity. I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. If you're a new listener, welcome. If you've been here with me for a while, welcome back. I'm really glad that you're here. My name is Tina Gosni, and I am a family conflict coach and a family life educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your child, you know, your adult child feels strained, confusing, and even painful. And we do it through a family systems lens. So I want to start today by doing something a little different. I want to describe some different mothers to you. And I want you to listen for yourself and try to find the version of the story that sounds closest to yours. Because one of the loneliest things about Mother's Day is the assumption that, you know, everyone else has figured out something that I haven't figured out. That difficulty is personal. It feels like there's a flaw in you, like there's something wrong with you, rather than it really being a whole quiet army of women that are navigating the same thing at the same time that you are. You are not alone in this, and I want to prove that to you today. Here's four the mother whose adult child has gone silent. This is the estranged mother. Her phone doesn't ring on Mother's Day. It probably hasn't for years. Or this might even be the first Mother's Day that it's not ringing. She doesn't get a text. She has learned to plan her day around silence. And she does that by distracting herself or staying really busy so she doesn't have to sit inside a silent day. But you know what? That silence finds her anyway. It finds her as she walks through the grocery store and sees all of those flowers lined up. It finds her in social media where she's looking at all the smiley, happy pictures of mothers and their children. It finds her in that, you know, that half second in the morning when she wakes up and she reaches for her phone and then remembers. She's grieving someone who is still alive. And that particular kind of grief does not get a casserole. It doesn't get a funeral. And there's no culturally approved way for it to be felt. So she carries it alone in the dark, and the world just kind of wonders and talks behind her back about what she did to make it happen. And then there's the mother whose relationship with her child is just difficult. This mother hasn't lost contact, but she is losing ground. Every conversation feels tense, and there's this underlying anxiety that she just can't quite name. She really loves her child profoundly, but she struggles with who they have become. She doesn't always like who she is when they're together either. So she can feel something really important, this relationship slipping away slowly, and she does not know how to stop it. She'll probably get a text on Mother's Day. She might even get flowers, and she's gonna feel really grateful and sad as she holds those flowers. Because the relationship that they represent is not the one that she really hoped that she would have. And she doesn't feel like she's allowed to grieve it because at least her child is still speaking to her, at least there's still contact. She doesn't feel allowed to be sad, but she is. And I want to say she really is allowed to be. Now there's the mother whose child is struggling and she can't fix it. Maybe her son is battling addiction. Her daughter is in a relationship that really frightens her. Or her child has a mental illness that is unmanageable and unpredictable. And every phone call feels really risky. It could be fine, it also could be a crisis. And she never knows which one it's going to be until she answers. Now, this mother has learned this particular hyper-vigilance. It's something that never turns off. She sleeps with her phone, the volume turned all the way up. She measures every interaction for signs that something's wrong and checks facial expressions and tone of voice. And she loves her child fiercely. And it's so fierce that it is exhausting to be this vigilant. And so she's grieved over and over in many different ways. That child that she was raising and the life she thought that they would have. So Mother's Day for her is not about silence, it's about showing up in a relationship that is unpredictable and unresolved. And she's trying to love someone through something that she can't either fix or fully accept. And so she gets up the next day and does it all over again. And the day after that, and she does it all over again and it doesn't stop. She is so proud of them and she really wants to be proud of them. She raised them to be independent and to pursue their dreams, to build a life that was fully theirs that they could own. And then they did that. And then they moved across the country. Or to another continent. Or their life simply got so full and so busy that she doesn't hear from them much anymore. And their visits have gotten fewer and shorter. No one tells you that when you successfully launch your child, that you'll feel loss. There's very little language for the grief of a mother who got exactly what she worked for and feels hollow in the place where all that daily proximity used to live. She might not even let herself name that this is what she's feeling is grief because her child's fine, because they're happy, and because this is how it's supposed to be. But inside her life and inside her home, everything is different. Her role is different. What she does every day is different. And on Mother's Day, she's she misses them so much that it's almost feels embarrassing to admit. She's not supposed to feel like this. She wonders why she can't be happy for them when everyone else tells her that she is supposed to be. And she is deeply sad for what used to be. Then there's the mother whose child chose a life that she didn't choose for them. Could be they chose a partner that she doesn't trust or she has trouble connecting with, or maybe a partner that has restructured the access the mother has to her child. Maybe it's a difference in religious beliefs or a political worldview that clashes, or a lifestyle that feels so foreign and really frightening to the mother. Maybe it's just some values that diverge slowly over time. And like in the last decade, and she and the child now look at the world so differently that it's hard to even have a conversation. Now, she does not always love who her child is being in the world, although she fiercely loves her child. And she is navigating very quietly and very carefully and often unsupported, the gap between the person that she raised and the person who's there that's living their life on their own terms. And that gap has a grief in it. That grief holds the picture that she wanted her life to look like, for the closeness that she assumed that they would have, for the version of her child that has been in her mind for decades, but no longer exists. And now we have the mother in the in-between. Maybe her child just left for college, or just got married, or they might have even just had their first baby, and suddenly the dynamic in their relationship has shifted in ways that she did not anticipate. She isn't needed in the same way. The calls are shorter, visits are structured around someone else's schedule now. She's really trying to figure out in real time who she is to this person that she gave 20 years of her life to. That transition has a name. It's called a role transition. And it is one of the most disorienting experiences that a mother can go through precisely because it's framed as good news. Your child is thriving, they're becoming who they were meant to be. Your job is done, you can celebrate. And yet there's something real happening inside of you that doesn't feel like celebrating. And if you're honest, it sounds and feels a lot like loss. And that's real and it counts. And it belongs in this conversation too. Wherever you are in that list, in those descriptions of different mothers, whether you heard your whole story or just a little piece of it, or maybe you found yourself in little bits and pieces of each. I want you to know that this episode is for you. All of you. And I want to give you some language for what you're carrying. First, I'm going to tell you about two researchers whose work changed the way that I understand what so many of you are going through. The first is this therapist and her professor named Pauline Boss. Back in the 1970s, she was working with families of soldiers who were MIA, they were missing in action. Men who had not come home from Vietnam. Their bodies had never been found. These families were suffering in a different way from families who had lost a soldier to death. Because as brutal as death is, there is a moment of knowing. There's a funeral, there's a grave, there's a before, and there's an after. But these families, they were living in a permanent in-between. Their person was gone, but they weren't gone. The loss was real, but it was unconfirmed. And Pauline Boss called this ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is grief without an ending. It's a loss that never resolves. It's a wound that can't close because the thing that caused it is not something you can actually put your finger on. It's very undecided. Here's what I want you to hear. Ambiguous loss lives in almost every story I described. When your relationship with your child is strained and you don't know if it's ever going to feel close again, that's ambiguous loss. When your child moved away and that version of daily life that you used to share is gone, you can't quite call it a loss because they're fine, but it is. It's ambiguous loss. When your child is struggling and you can see underneath who they're showing you, you can she see the person that they used to be, and you're trying to wait for them to find their way back to you, that is ambiguous loss. When you raised a child and you pictured a future, and the future that you're now living looks nothing like the one that you pictured. That is ambiguous loss. So think of it like this: imagine there's a door handle that you're holding, and the door is shut. On the other side of that door is someone that you really love. You know that they're there. You can hear them. Sometimes you get you can see them, even get little glimpses of them, but the door is not going to open and you don't know if it ever will. And people keep walking by and they keep saying stuff like, Why don't you just let go? And you can't. Because what if you let go and then they open the door? So you hold on. And that is exhausting. And you can't explain that to most people. There's a second researcher, and his name is Kenneth Doka. He gave us this concept of disenfranchised grief. Now, disenfranchised grief is a grief that society doesn't officially recognize or validate. So it's grief that doesn't get casseroles, and people don't know how to respond to you. So they often will say the wrong thing, or they will just never say anything at all. That I described in the so here's what I want to say to every single mother that I described in that last segment. Your grief is disenfranchised. Every single version of those mothers has disenfranchised grief. The mother that is in estrangement doesn't get her grief validated because people are assuming that she did something to cause it. The mother that's in a difficult relationship doesn't get her grief validated because, well, at least you're still talking. The mother whose child moved away doesn't get to grieve because your child is a success. This is a success story. The mother that's navigating this role transition doesn't get her grief validated because, look, her child is thriving, and isn't that a whole point of motherhood? Every single one of these griefs is real and legitimate, and almost none of them gets public acknowledgement and community support. And those are the things that help humans process loss. So now let's talk about Mother's Day specifically, because I think the holiday itself deserves its own examination. Mother's Day was created in the way that we know it now by a woman named Anna Jarvis in 1908. And this was a quiet memorial that she gave to her own mother. It was meant to be really personal and intimate and private. And then what happened? Well, Hallmark got a hold of it. And now it's a$36 billion commercial enterprise. And it's designed to celebrate exactly one version of motherhood. And that is the kind that is easy, reciprocated, and happy. So the ads show flowers and brunches and grown children with their arms around their mothers, and the grocery stores fill up with pink and red flowers, and your social media feed just gets bombarded by walls of evidence with all those happy mother-child relationships that exist all over the world. And it's all compressed into one single day. What happens if your relationship doesn't look like that? Well, then you're invisible. Worse than invisible. You're surrounded by a mirror that reflects back to you everything that you want and don't have. No wonder Mother's Day is hard. You're not being dramatic. You are not ungrateful. You're not ungrateful. You're carrying this grief that doesn't have an official container. And this one day of the year when the entire world is covered in flowers and branches and reminder of every version of motherhood that is not yours. You're not weak. You're not failing. You're carrying something really heavy. And you're carrying it alone. Well, I want that to change today, at least here, right now in this podcast. We're going to change that. Because I want to spend some time on something that I don't hear talked about enough. And that is this. Some of what you're grieving on Mother's Day is not a person. It's not your child. It's a picture. It's the life that you thought you were going to live. You had a picture. Maybe you didn't know that you have it, but you did. It was something that you unconsciously or consciously built or wrote down. It's there. It's always there. It's quietly forming from uh the moment you hold your baby or even before. This picture of what life is going to look like and how life is going to progress. A picture of Sunday dinners, of phone calls, of relationships that are easy and happy and friendly and supportive. And eventually, you know, you'd be watching your grandchildren learn to walk in your living room. And you pictured yourself being needed and close, and you were woven into the everyday life of your child's life in a permanent way. And then somehow, somewhere between now and then, the picture changed. Maybe that change was really sudden, and maybe it changed really slowly. Just the way a photograph fades. But you know, sometimes you can't even name the exact moment when you realized that the picture that you thought you were living doesn't match the one that you are living. But you know it and you fill that gap that on Mother's Day, especially when it rolls around and the day doesn't look like you imagined. So this is a particular kind of grief that lives in the spaces between the life that we expected and the life that we're actually living. And psychologists sometimes will call it the grief for the unlived life. It is one of the most difficult kinds of loss to process because there's no clear point, there's no clear um event to point to, there's no clear beginning, there's no clear end, and there's so there's no moment when you're officially allowed to grieve. The picture just faded. And you just kept waiting for it, that color, that brightness of it to come back into focus. But I want to be really honest with you about something because I think you deserve honesty. I think honesty is more helpful than comfort often. Some pictures, some relationships are permanently different from what you hoped they would be. Some distances, whether it's geographical or emotional, that becomes the new reality. And some versions of the future that you imagined are not going to come. I know this is really hard to hear, but I also believe this. Grieving the picture is not the same thing as giving up on the person. You can release the specific future that you imagined: the closeness, the phone calls, the Sunday dinners, the role that you thought you would play in their life. You can let that picture go and you can stay in the relationship. You can mourn what's happening without abandoning what's right in front of you. In fact, sometimes releasing the picture is the only way to see what's right in front of you. And when you stop measuring the relationship that you have against the one that you imagined, you could find something that you didn't expect. I'm not saying that it's gonna be better, and I'm not saying that it's going to be what you hoped for, but it's gonna be what's real and what is yours. I know a mother who has a child that moved to New Zealand. Literally, the other side of the world. They might see each other once a year if they're lucky. And this was years ago in her. She'd mourned her daughter for years. She mourned, like, you know, the closeness because her daughter used to live really close to her. So they could just go out to lunch, they could go shopping together, they could, she could stop by her daughter's house, her daughter could stop by her house. She was mourning the closeness that she experienced with her daughter. And she was so busy mourning for such a long time that she almost missed the relationship she still had. And then she discovered that relationship that still exists is really deep and honest. And it's built on real conversations because their time together is limited. And so they don't have time to waste on surface-level stuff. And so she told me, she said, I had to grieve the neighbor relationship to find the friend relationship. And the friend relationship, she says, turned out to be really extraordinary. Now, I am not promising you that because every story is different, but I am saying this: that the picture is allowed to change. And you're allowed to grieve it. And you're allowed to build something new in its place. This is not a consolation prize. This is life as it actually honestly is. I want to talk to the mothers who are in the middle of a transition. Because I think that particular experience is one of the most disorienting things that can happen to a mother. And it's also the least acknowledged. Let's just say your child just left for college or they got married or had a baby and became a parent or they moved out, or maybe they even recovered from something that had made them really dependent on you. And now they don't need you as much. No, all of these things are milestones. And the world is going to celebrate them. And they expect you to celebrate them too. And you do. You do celebrate them. You're proud of them. You're happy for them. You raise them to be this capable, independent version of themselves. And also, this is, and this is the part that no one talks about. There's something in you that feels completely lost. When your role as a mother changes, you don't just lose a job description, you lose a version of yourself. So for years and probably decades, this significant part of you identified, your identity was organized around being needed in a specific way by this specific person, your child. You knew what your mornings looked like because of them, you knew what your evenings looked like because of them. You knew what worry felt like and pride felt like, and what it felt like to be them for a while the most important person in their life. Your life had a shape that included them in it every day. And now that shape has changed. The world is celebrating that change, and you're standing in this quiet house wondering why you are grieving. Because you're not supposed to be grieving. This is a good thing, remember? You raised them for this. Well, I want to tell you something. That grief is not a sign that you got it wrong. It's not a sign that you were too controlling or you held on too tight or you made them too much the center of your life. The grief is a sign that you loved them well, that they were genuinely, deeply, and significantly important to you. And that absence from your daily life leaves a really big hole. This is called a role transition. And what makes it so disorienting is that unlike other losses, this one is framed as a success. No one brings you a casserole when your kid leaves for college. Nobody checks in on you after the wedding when the house is all of a sudden really quiet. No one acknowledges that the woman who spent 20 years being somebody else's everything is now in the middle of this profound identity crisis. But you're figuring it out and mostly without support. Who are you when you are not primarily someone's mother in a daily sense? And here's what I want to say about that, especially right now around Mother's Day. You're not just a mother. You were actually a whole person before that child was born, and you are a whole person right now. That role that organized your life for 20 or so years is changing, but you are not disappearing. You are in the middle of one of the most significant reinventions that a woman can go through. And that reinvention deserves to be treated with the same seriousness and tenderness that you would give to any other major loss. So give yourself permission to grieve the version of your life that is ending. Give permission to not know yet what the new version looks like. And give yourself permission to be in the messy middle without having to arrive at someone, at something on someone else's timeline. That messy middle is real and you are allowed to be in it as long as you need to be. Now I want to talk to some about something that almost every mother carries, regardless of her specific situation, and that is the weight of other people's opinions. Because here's what happens when you try to talk about any of the things that we've talked about yet. Watch their faces. Watch their body language. Watch them pause just a little bit too long. And then one of a few things happens. If you're in estrangement, you're gonna get the look. The thought that crosses their face, they're too polite to say it usually, but they're thinking, well, there must be a reason. Children don't just walk away for nothing. If your relationship is difficult, you're gonna get the advice. Have you tried family therapy? Have you told them how you feel? As if you haven't spent years trying every variation on every approach? And as if this is a problem that hasn't occurred to you to solve? No, if your child moved away or your role has changed, you get cheerfulness. Aren't you so proud? That's wonderful. Well, those reactions close down the conversation before you even really open it. Because how do you say, yes, and I'm grieving without sounding like you're not supporting their life? And if your child made choices that you didn't choose for them, a partner that you struggle with, or a lifestyle you don't understand, a worldview that feels foreign, you get silence. People don't know what to say, so they don't say anything, which leaves you standing alone in the middle of something real with no one to help you carry it. But the hardest judgment is the one that you have turned on yourself. No matter which story is yours, there is a version, the internal monologue that sounds like, what did I do wrong? Where did I go wrong? Was there that thing that happened when they were seven? You know, that other thing that happened when they were 15? Was it the divorce? Was it the move? Was it the way that I could barely get out of bed for those three years because I was just drowning? You start being a detective of your own past and of their past, and you look for the moment, that one thing that broke everything. And I want to say something about this detective work because I think it really matters. Some of what you're finding in that investigation is really real. You were not a perfect mother because that's impossible to do. No mother is perfect. You made mistakes, and some of them were small, and some were pretty big because you were the human being doing the best that she knew how with the resources that she had and what she knew at the time. All of this is true, and we can look at it with honesty and compassion. And another thing about that detective work is that it will often, almost always, go too far. Human relationships, especially mother-child relationships, are not simple cause and effect machines. You can't say, well, I made that mistake in 1999, and now that means that's explaining why this distance is happening today. People are complicated. You know, children grow up to be their own separate people, and they have wounds separate from yours, and they have separate needs, and they make separate choices. The relationship that you have now is not a verdict on the mother that you've been in the past. So I want to offer you something important, and that is that two things can be true at the same time. You were not a perfect mother, and the current state of this relationship is not entirely your fault. Both. You know, both of those at the same time. You're allowed to have both of those without collapsing into shame or being defensive. You're allowed to say, I made mistakes, and I'm still not the villain of this story. I tried hard and I don't have the outcome that I hoped for. I love my child and I don't have full control over what the relationship becomes. That's a really hard place to stand, but it's an honest one. And if we're not going to be honest with ourselves, we can't start the healing process. I don't want to leave you in all this grief without offering you something to hold on to. So let's talk practically about how do you get through Mother's Day, not just surviving it, but actually meeting it head on. So we're gonna go through several things. First, I want you to give yourself full permission to feel whatever you're feeling. Don't edit it, don't manage that for other people's comfort. If you need to cry, then cry. If you need to be angry, then be angry. If you feel numb because you've been feeling everything for so long, then feel numb. That's okay too. Grief does not have a set required emotion that's attached to it. And gratitude and sadness can live in the same body on the same day. Second, plan the day with intention. Don't let just let it happen to you. Decide in advance, this is gonna help me and this is gonna hurt me because you know yourself better than anyone else. And for some of you, being around a lot of people is gonna be really great for you. And for others, it's gonna feel like being around a lot of people is pouring salt in a wound. So know yourself and honor what you need that day. Third, step away from social media. You know, Instagram, Facebook, any other social media is not a reflection of the reality of motherhood. That is very carefully curated. Nobody posts, you know, we had a difficult phone call today, or it was really difficult when we were sitting and eating brunch in silence, or I sat in my car in the driveway for a half an hour before I had the courage to go in. Nobody posts those things. So you don't have to look at it. The feed is not the truth. You get to choose differently. Just don't go on to those uh sites on Mother's Day. Fourth, find your people. Now, whatever version you struggle with, I promise you, you are not alone. There are other women in that same phase of life. So there are communities, they are online and in person, mothers in estrangement, mothers of struggling children, mothers navigating empty nests and role transitions and relationships that didn't turn out the way that they hoped. If you find even one person who understands you, who doesn't look at you with you know that expression, this can be really life-saving. And fifth, and this is the one that I really want you to sit with today. Do something that honors who you are, not focusing on the relationship that you're struggling with. Whatever your story is, your motherhood is real. You stayed up through fevers and nightmares, and you had lots of worry and love, and that there is no equivalent in the human experience to that of being a mother. You loved and still do love that child. And that does not diminish with what is happening right now. So honor that. Maybe you plant something, maybe you write yourself a letter that tells you everything, the all the gratitude and appreciation that you need to hear that day. Maybe you find somewhere to put that enormous love that you're holding, like a charity or a mentorship or a younger family member who still needs you. This is not a replacement for your difficult relationship, but it's a way of saying, my love is still here and I have a lot to offer. You are still a mother, regardless of distance or silence or difficulty or transition or any of the other complicated things that make the Mother's Day hard for you. I want to close by telling you something that I really believe. And I believe that love is never wasted. So every moment that you prepared a meal, that you sat up worrying, that you had a sleepless night, or you extended some grace when you were just running on empty, all of that was real. And it mattered even when you don't see any benefits from it now. Now I believe that the picture that you carried was built out of love and that grieving it does not make you weak. It just makes you human. Humans make pictures of the future because we love people so much that we want to keep them close to us. And when we grieve the picture, that is an act of love, not a failure of acceptance. I believe you're in the middle of something, not at the end. I don't think that we ever turn out. Relationships shift, people change. Adult children who seem unreachable at 30 sometimes surprise us by 40. So distances that have felt permanent sometimes have come back closer. And dynamics that seemed like they were never gonna change and like they were just frozen solid. Sometimes those those thaw. Not always, and not always on your timeline, especially, and not in a way that you can control, but I just want you to realize that the story is never over. And I believe, I really know that you deserve more than survival, more than white knuckling your way through Mother's Day. You deserve, you deserve a life that's full and meaningful and joyful, regardless of what is or is not resolved in those relationships. You found this episode somehow. Maybe this is exactly what you were supposed to hear today. Before I let you go, if this episode reached you today, if something inside you, something that I said made you feel a little bit less alone in what you're carrying, would you take just 30 seconds and leave a review on Apple Podcasts? Here's what reviews actually do. They help mothers who are Googling things like, why is Mother's Day so hard? Or my adult child won't talk to me, or I don't recognize my life anymore. They help those mothers that are searching those things find this show. They help us reach that mother who's sitting in the car in the driveway right now, thinking that nobody understands her. So you found this podcast somehow. Maybe you can be the reason that another woman finds it. So please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and give me five stars if I've earned them today. And a few words, maybe, if you have them, because your words might be what somebody else needs to read today. I'm Tina Gosny. This is Coaching Your Family Relationships. Take good care of yourself, and I'll see you next week.