Story: Becoming Mother at Eleven – A Letter of Forgiveness to Myself

Today’s journal page opens up my personal story in a letter penned to myself younger eleven year old self with so much love and forgiveness:

Dear little Lisa,

You are standing there barefoot with a bike, and the weight of the world already tugging at your little shoulders. I see your hair tousled, your dress ruffled, your gaze steady but unsure. I see you.

I wish I could reach into this photo and wrap you in the kind of embrace you never got when everything fell apart. I want you to know ~ none of what happened was your fault.

You should have been riding that bike through the streets with the wind in your hair and a scraped knee your biggest worry. But instead, you walked through that door one day, and all trace of your mother was gone. In a moment, the soft place to land disappeared, and you became the landing place for others.

You cooked meals, brushed hair, dried tears, tried to understand a world that never made space for your own pain. And no one came to say, “You shouldn’t have had to do this.”

So I am here now to say it: You shouldn’t have had to carry what you carried.

I forgive you for not knowing how to hold it all.

I forgive you for the times you felt angry or broken or tired.

I forgive you for how hard you tried to make it all okay when it wasn’t.

But more than that ~ I bless you.

I bless your courage, your devotion, your fierce loyalty to your brother and sister.

I bless the way you kept showing up, day after day, heart cracked wide open.

You grew up too fast, but even in those stolen years, something sacred endured in you. You didn’t know it then, but you were sowing seeds of the mother you’d become ~ the one who would hold her own children, even in the ashes of her own pain. The one who would rise again, in her forties, in her fifties, in her faith.

Little one, I carry you with me now. You don’t have to keep being strong on your own anymore. You get to rest. You get to be held. You are not forgotten.

And I love you ~ more than I ever knew how to say until now.

With all the tenderness in the world,

Yourself, grown and healing

*If you too have had to endure traumatic upheavals in childhood, I hear you, I see you and I am walking right beside you letting you know that it’s alright to feel every level of emotion.*