New Moon

Colloquially, we talk a lot about “daddy issues.”

While I would be the first to admit I am not a fan of mine, and our relationship is not fantastic, I have not been confused or conflicted about my thoughts and feeling with regard to him since I was 12 years old and he chose his meth-addicted girlfriend’s whims over my well-being.

Message received. I’m all set there.

Going through that experience really helped crystalize for me something I couldn’t quite grasp before; my dad did not like or care about me.

He loved me. In that way that a person who has children as kind of a vanity project and appreciates seeing an expression of themselves out in the world can love. But on a personal level, he did not like me.

Turns out, the feeling was mutual.

The upside of this is that I didn’t care anymore that he didn’t. I had so little respect for him that his approval was never of any value to me. I wasn’t interpreting his lack of connection or concern for me as a flaw or deficit in myself, but rather a complete failure of character on his part.

So. No daddy issues.

Mommy issues, on the other hand…

My mother had a very particular charm about her. She was funny and smart and charismatic while maintaining a complete disregard for propriety that made her seem like she was above the petty vagaries of guilt and societal expectations.

She referred to herself as a gypsy, but I think Bohemian probably captures the energy a little better. She had a pointed contempt for any stricture laid upon her pursuit of pleasure. She enjoyed her role as a rebel and sometime outlaw, relishing her refusal to let anyone tell her what to do.

She instilled in me a certain shamelessness I am very deeply grateful for. I do not carry the weight of her unrealized expectations nor that of having to care what anyone thinks of me. It was likely the best and only thing she really had to offer me as a mother.

As a child I loved my mother, of course, but I also liked her. Even though she was almost uniformly cold and frequently cruel, she was also very winning in her way. I wanted her approval, unlike that of my father.

I didn’t know I was doomed from the start until much later.

The first disappointment came in my not having been the boy she so desperately wanted. In the same way mother regularly told my older sister she had ruined her life, she told me I was supposed to be a boy. A boy she would have named Aaron Justice. And since I was NOT the boy she had anticipated, that she handed me to my father and said “This is your fault, you name her.”

She gave this little speech frequently. She said it in a tone that implied it was amusing, rather than cruel.

It wasn’t until much later that I came to understand how profoundly her internalized misogyny shaped our relationship. It simply would have been easier for her to love a boy. She centered men everywhere in her life, and I had deprived her of the chance to do that as a parent. She really never forgave me.

I have one vivid memory of tenderness between us. I think I remember not only because I craved such contact so much but because it was truly so vanishingly rare. It was the night before my 9th birthday. I was standing in the kitchen and she came up to me and picked me up in her arms and said “Oh, my little twinkie is turning 9.”

For her to initiate physical contact of any kind was very unusual. For it to be affectionate was almost unheard of. I am wont to joke that the only time anybody touched me as a kid was to hurt me, but its really not a joke.

Our relationship was complicated. While she was actively vicious to my sister, she was only occasionally intentionally cruel to me. She talked to me as though I was her equal from a very (probably inappropriately) young age. She took me seriously and didn’t act like the things I said were trivial just because I was a child. It helped me understand early on that my understanding of the world was valid and my judgement could be trusted.

Things got more complicated when I became an adolescent. She had always had a fondness for much younger men and suddenly she saw me as a rival for their attention. I tried in every way possible to assure her that I had NO INTEREST in drawing their regard and that if she thought that’s what was happening she should consider the problem to be the creepy guy she was dating, not her daughter walking through her house minding her own business.

Once I moved out and she no longer felt any pressure to actively parent me (not that there had been much of that to begin with) things got better. She was more able to communicate that she was rooting for me, even if it was in oblique terms. Once she turned to me and said “Oh Autumn. You know I’ve always thought you were the bee’s knees.”

This is earnestly one of the sweetest things she ever said to me. The fact that I absolutely did NOT know she felt that way until she said it, notwithstanding.

We navigated a lot of difficult and painful relationship dynamics. Fault-finding and recriminations were pretty common. There is no denying many of our patterns were toxic to me at best. But, I still loved her and wanted her in my life.

But, she was the keeper of my historical truth. She had known me all my days and even though her view of me was particular to her, I liked having her tell me from time to time how I was born exactly who I am in a tone of rare admiration.

I visited in January of 2015. I was on my way to Banff to fulfil a life long obsession to see the place. Her house was just under half way there so I stopped and spent the night at her place.

I recall a perfectly pleasant tone between us. She expressed mild concern that I’d be warm enough sleeping in the back of my SUV. I reassured her I had a plan and emergency funds for a hotel if it came to that.

I left very early in the morning and didn’t wake her to say goodbye. I had no notion it would be the last time I saw her. A little over a year later we had a conversation where I refused to play into her victim mentality and set a boundary firmly. She stopped talking to me, blocked me on social media, and refused to respond to even one of MANY attempts I made to contact her.

Little did I know it was that unforgivable.

I remained unhealed.

For a lot of years, I simply chose to suppress and ignore my mother wounds. I had other things I needed to be getting on with, and dwelling on distant pain didn’t seem like a good use of my emotional currency.

It had already begun to come to my attention that this approach wasn’t serving me. That just because I was ignoring the pain didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was touching and harming most of my relationships and I wanted it to change. I was cognizant to a certain degree of how these particular wounds – my mommy issues – were central to my understanding of how to give, receive, practice, and experience love.

I was in therapy and conducting deep emotional inquiry into these dark places when in June of 2025 she passed away due to complications from congestive heart failure secondary to a massive stroke.

Her death has cracked me open. In ways that are excruciating and necessary. Painful and absolutely liberating. It was almost as though I had to fully relinquish any hope of regaining her favor in order to question whether it was still what I wanted.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

It is hard to see in the dark. Not impossible in most cases, but difficult. Because of my amblyopia I am actually better able to see in extremely low light conditions than most people. Though this is of course a result of genetic chance and parental neglect, it is also peculiarly apt that it is so. I have a certain fearlessness in the face of shadow work. I can face difficulty and proceed without falling prey to hopelessness.

And while the darkness I have been dwelling in is more prolonged – as is the way of grief – it doesn’t feel dangerous or lonely there. It feels free of distraction. It feels essential and thus populated with only that which can endure long with little tending.

The new moon represents a time to depart from places where all use has passed. To move in darkness toward a future where intentions articulated will come to full flower.

So, on this new moon, I set my will to allow tenderness to inhabit me. I embrace the effort of dismantling limiting beliefs about what I deserve and what I can give to others. I embrace the courage to be my true soft self. I shed the mantle of who my mother told me I am to inhabit the truest self she never even met.

I create as I speak. So mote it be.