How To Live With Your Mother

Beginnings

This is the beginning of a series of blogs about how to live with your mother. I’m choosing to write about this now as I arrive at the 7.5 year mark of living with my own mother. In these blogs I will share with you how to do it well, and not so well, together with the lessons I learned along the way. More than anything, I hope to offer you some inspiration, hope, and faith in the mother-daughter relationship, whatever your own relationship and situation is with your own mother.

It has been a humbling experience sharing a home with my mother, now 80 and in her winter years. I feel that is is something we would all benefit from as our world becomes increasingly separate from each other. If you had told my 20 year old self that I would be living under the same roof again with my mother in my 40s I would never have believed you! I was a strong-willed young woman who thought her mother definitely did not know best. I could not wait to find freedom and independence so left home as soon as I could and moved to Paris at 16.

In these blogs, I will lay out the softening that brought us back together, the inevitable difficulties as we merged households, and the undeniable benefits of generational living. If you are considering living with your mother or would like to heal the mother-daughter relationship then this is for you. I will be sharing poetry and meditations that have inspired and helped with my own healing and provide you with some journal prompts for your own self inquiry as we move from pain into acceptance in the mother-daughter journey.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

- The serenity prayer