Episode 211. Mother’s Day Is Complicated—Let’s Talk About It
Mother’s Day is a complicated one for me—and I know I’m not alone. In this episode, I open up about my relationship with Mother’s Day, especially after losing my mom just over a year ago.
This isn’t a conversation about flowers and brunch plans (though I’m not knocking either). This is a deeper reflection on grief, forgiveness, healing, and the legacy we carry—and sometimes rewrite—as daughters and mothers.
For most of my life, I had a complicated relationship with my mom. It wasn’t something I talked about publicly while she was alive, but now, as I work on the book about our story, I feel called to share more—especially for those of you who also didn’t grow up with the Hallmark version of a mother-daughter relationship.
In this episode, I share:
Why Mother’s Day can feel like grief, even if your mom is still alive
What helped me begin to forgive my mom—and why it didn’t require a conversation
The full-circle moment at our final Mother’s Day together
Why I chose to write a book instead of telling our story on social media
A powerful reframe around forgiveness, boundaries, and self-honoring
What to do when you feel like “celebrating” just doesn’t feel aligned
Whether you’re missing your mom, navigating a strained relationship, or just feeling the heaviness this day can bring—I hope this episode meets you with compassion and validation.
And as a gift, I’ve added a link to access a guided healing meditation —a gentle energy transmission through the mother line. You can revisit it anytime. It’s not a one-time fix, but it’s a sacred step.
🌸 Listen in and remember:
You can honor Mother’s Day in your own way. You can feel grief and gratitude in the same breath. You can hold the full complexity of love, disappointment, and healing—and still choose softness.
If this resonates, I’d love if you shared the episode with someone who needs it. You’re not alone in this.
Links & Resources:
1. Connect with Nichole Joy on IG: https://www.instagram.com/nichole_joy__/
2. Stay in the loop & receive a free gift from me. Enter your info at the link below, and I’ll keep you posted on the book’s publishing date. Also, I’ll send you a copy of the meditation to your inbox:
Transcript:
Mother's Day is coming up in a couple days here in the United States, and I have been reflecting quite a bit this year about Mother's Day and my complicated relationship throughout my life with Mother's Day. So I decided to hop onto the podcast and share a little bit of that with you. I feel compelled to share with you because not all of us have.
Hallmark style relationships with our mother, and I think that it's important to speak to that
on a personal level. This is my second mother's day without my mom. My mom died in April of 2024, so that first Mother's Day was about a month later. It was rough. Um. This year is also I've, I've had a lot of that, um, anxious energy moving through me this week. In between my birthday and Mother's Day, I just celebrated my 42nd birthday.
So this week I. This year, it's one week in between. And this week I've felt a lot of that anxious energy. So I've been doing things like cleaning the cushions on my patio furniture because that's the kind of stuff that I do to move energy. It's not necessarily a distraction, it's just something that I need to do to move the energy and not try to force myself to do any specific thing.
Um, but we'll get into that more of that in a moment, about how to nourish yourself when you feel complicated feelings and emotions coming up.
This episode is not about the traditional perspective that we see on advertisements and all over social media and just everywhere when you step outside your house about Mother's Day and the traditional ways in the US anyway, that we honor Mother's on Mother's Day. Um, and listen, I enjoy a solid Mother's Day gift.
I enjoy. My family honoring me as a mother. And also I can tune into the duality and honor the duality that is conflicting emotions and feelings about what Mother's Day is. And so this is more than that traditional sense. Um, this is about grief, about healing, and about legacy. I wanna talk about grief first because that's the freshest and the first thing that's coming to mind.
So. Something that I've held really close to me since I've been in online business really since late 2017. Um, I've shared quite a bit about my experience in this world on social media, on the podcast, and various platforms. And one of the things that I've never really shared publicly is about my complicated relationship with my mother.
And that's partly because when she was alive, I never felt like I wanted to hurt her feelings or bash her or make her feel any type of way. Um. However, now that she's passed, I feel that it's absolutely necessary that I share some of our relationship. Because of the place that we, we were able to come and what we were able to do.
That when I look around at the other people who talk about complicated relationships with their mothers, and it's not common in the public, there's not a lot of people who talk about this publicly. In my experience, it tends to be something that people talk about in private containers. We don't hear a lot of stories about people who, number one, had a complicated relationship with their mother, and then number two, were able to forgive and then as a bonus we're able to have a relationship with them.
So I have started to open up a little bit, but since she passed, I realized I wanted it to go our story to go into a book because I feel like social media, um, just isn't worthy of her story, isn't worthy of our story. The nature of social media, uh, it just doesn't feel like that was a good enough space for us.
And so I decided that it was going to be in a book, and I felt more and more confirmation in those early days, weeks and months after she passed that I needed to write a book about this. And I've had a lot of conflicting feelings about that as well over the last 15 months. Um, I'll share more on that later.
First, again, I wanna go back to grief. I wanna talk about grief and not just, if your mother has passed, you can grieve somebody while they're still alive. And this is a, a realization that I had over the last couple months really, is that I haven't just been grieving my mother for 15 months, sorry, 13 months.
13 months. I haven't only been grieving her passing. I was grieving my mother while she was still alive. I was grieving the woman who she was and the mother who she was, and the version of her that I didn't get to experience. And it's complicated, right? I can talk about it more comfortably now, but it took me a long time to get to this place.
And a lot of work. A lot of work. This is something I've been working on. You'll, you'll learn more about it in the book, but I've been grieving that you know who she was in this life, and what I've come to realize is that. In the words of one of my fav favorite astrologers, Danielle Page. You might not like it, but you're gonna experience it.
And this was something that my soul signed up for. This is something that my mom's soul signed up for, and I came into this form, into this body and this experience to have this experience with her and for her soul to have the experience with me and zooming out and thinking about our big picture dynamic.
We are really both just actors in each other's experiences, helping each other have the journey that it's meant to have. I didn't always like her decisions. I didn't always love the way that she showed up for me and the way that she didn't show up for me. But what I've come to is accepting and allowing her to just be who she is and who she was.
If you zoom out and do the work, one of the things that I hope you can come to, if you've also had a challenging relationship with your own mother is compassion. Compassion is a powerful feeling. It's a, it's a gift to the other person. Because it's not always a fun experience for them to have this experience that they had either.
It's not always something that they look back on fondly and are proud of, but it's the experience that they chose and the experience that we chose. And this is gonna ruffle some feathers, but it's important to say.
So my question to you is, what do you do when Mother's Day feels more like grief than a celebratory day? In short, you honor the grief. You sit in it, you do whatever it is that feels nourishing to your system. You read, you go for a walk, you sleep, you Netflix, you go to the beach. Spend time with your mother or you don't.
You pick up the phone and call her, even if it's the first time you've spoken to her in years or you don't.
My suggestion first is to honor wherever you're at and to sit in the feelings, because numbing them out is not helpful. It's actually harmful to you.
It's really hard to not numb it out. It's very challenging, but I believe that we can do it because I've done it. I haven't had alcohol in six years, and it has allowed me to be so present in what I'm feeling in any given moment, and it's so healthy because it allows me to sit with and honor the feeling and let it move through me.
It doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change the experience. Sometimes there's still pain. There's been pain for years. There's still moments where I feel a lot of pain and a lot of grief about who she wasn't.
But I'm trying to not force my body to hold onto that, but allow my body to release it because I want to create legacy for myself, and in order for me to do that, I wanna have longevity in this life. I wanna be around to be a mother to my kids for a very, very, very long time. It's important for me to not hold onto those feelings in my body.
I'm gonna go back to the book for a moment and. Talk about a, uh, talk a little bit about this, our story and how we went from this is what's effectively in the book. How we went from a very, very challenged relationship to the point that we didn't talk for years at one point, to the point where we were talking multiple times a week, and I looked forward to talking to her and visiting with her, and that didn't just happen.
It happened. Because of the work that I was putting in and what she was available for. And I explained a lot more of the detail in the book. But the point is, pretty soon after she passed, you know, it was pretty, it was very sudden. It was two weeks from the day that she went into the hospital with a swollen leg.
Two less than two weeks later she was gone. And the amount of people who were reaching out, what happened? What happened, what happened? Wanted to know the play by play. I, I didn't have the bandwidth to answer everybody. I. Then at her memorial service I did the main speaking and then I invited others to come up and share.
And I had siblings who shared, and some of our very close friends and family members shared. But I prepared something to to present for my mother. And afterward when everybody was done speaking, I was inundated by her clients who became her friends. From friends, friends of the family, other family members of people just pouring back into me.
Now, part of it was they probably felt compassion for me and empathy, and wanted me to know that I did a good job. But there was also this layer of. There's something about this connection between you and your mother that not a lot of people saw, because we weren't together in front of a lot of her friends, often as adults, as me being an adult, right.
But people were picking up pieces and realized that this connection that her and I have and invited me to share more of her stories. And they continued to ask questions and they said, you've gotta share her story, you've gotta share her story, you've gotta share her story. 'cause I did share a little bit of her story at the memorial and I was like, okay.
And I was processing and at first, I. I wasn't ready to talk about it publicly. I wasn't ready to share on social media because I was emotional and I would cry and I, I don't really love getting on podcasts and crying. I don't love getting on social media and crying. It's fine if you do. I don't care, but I, it's just something I'd rather not do.
I try to speak from a healed space, not an open wound, and still there's lots of layers of this wound that need to be healed. So it's not a fully healed space, but I can talk about it in a different way now than I could 13 months ago. So pretty soon I realized I didn't really wanna go to social media to talk about our story.
I had so much to share and so much that didn't fit into a caption. And the thing about social media is, you know, I, I enjoy social media sometimes, but when you post something that you work, you put a lot of energy and effort into writing a really beautiful. Message, it's gone in like a couple days. That's very short shelf life.
That wasn't something that I wanted for my mother because she had a relatively short life in her human, in her physical form this time, and I wanted something that was more legacy and I kept getting confirmation about the book and I felt like, who am I to write a book about her? And I kept getting confirmation from.
The, the beings that I seek out guidance from God, my guides, the universe, this is my crew. And I kept getting confirmation from my people, my beings. I even saw the book cover, um, I mentioned this in a previous episode. I saw the book cover and I was like, oh, okay. It's taken me some time and I actually traveled.
The month that she passed, I traveled to the West coast. Um, I was by myself on an airplane for several hours and I had my laptop and I had no children asking me for things, for snacks, for this, for that. So I wrote, I wrote out so much, and over the last 13 months I've had spurts where I go in and write and go in and write, and it's continuing to evolve and continuing to incubate.
And hopefully within the next couple of months it'll be ready to share with you. And it won't just be a memoir or a biography of her life. It's one part, memoir my side, one part biography, her side, and then the whole is us together and our healing journey and a personal narrative. So it's a really interesting.
Format, and I felt like it was important to share so that you can get to know her and me and our dynamic together and how we were able to get to that place because I feel like it's a disservice to the collective if I don't share that it's possible. Many of the women who I've talked to. Over the years in private containers who have challenging history with their mother, don't feel that there's hope.
And even the ones that say they've forgiven and they're fine, everything's fine. Underneath it all, I don't believe that many of them have really gotten to the place where they have freed themselves. They're saying one thing, but underneath the surface something else is going on. And I understand because I was there for a long time.
That's why I can recognize it because I was there. I've had that experience. Being on the other side of it, I realize how far you can go and I realize what's possible. And this also isn't to say that having a relationship with your mother is always possible. It's not. And I know that it's probably, um, in many situations it may be more healthy, uh, to honor yourself and hold the boundary and not have a relationship.
And that doesn't mean you don't forgive. The two don't always have to go together. So forgiveness doesn't always mean having a relationship with your parent, with your mother. Sometimes forgiveness is just forgiveness. And then you continue to decide not to have a relationship, but you freed yourself and that's okay.
But in certain instances, it is possible to have a relationship and it's like icing on the cake. One of the things that I've grieved is that it took us that long to get to that place, and I'm sad that it took us the better part of my first 40 years to get there. I'm also grateful that we were able to get there.
Throughout the book, I share how we got to that place. For us, it wasn't through traditional talk therapy. That was just not something that we would've been available for to do together. I. For us, it was energy healing that I've been practicing and learning for six years now, since 2019. And the interesting part is, in the beginning when I first started doing energy healing with expansion principle, I had no intention on using it on my mother.
That was not what I, my brain thought it was for back then. Then fast forward six years. One of my reflections when I look back is I'm realizing why that tool was brought into my life and why I started using energy healing. And I explain a lot of detail in the book about how that happened
and how two years ago, May 5th, 2023, for the very first time I hosted a public event on. I think it was called Motherhood Deco Motherhood Coding, healing Your Mother Line. And I was really anxious about holding the event and promoting it because to talk about it meant talking about the mother wound. I hesitated to talk about the mother wound up until that point because I didn't want it to rub my mom the wrong way.
And so every time I promoted that event, I had to be very intentional. I wanted to be very intentional with how I talked about what the mother wound was, which in my opinion and in my experience, it's not just based on your mother's actions and choices and how that affected you. It goes deeper than that, and I explain a lot of that in the book as well.
I wanted to present this as a Mother's Day gift to my following, to my community in person, and I almost fell out of my chair when my mom bought a ticket. So up until that point, I had done energy healing work on myself and on my lineage on her side, which. Impacted her because the nature of EP expansion principle that I use is that it heals through the line all the way back to the origin of whatever the thing and all the way forward.
So my mother always experienced the secondhand healing. So she was experience if her soul was open and available to it, which she was, she was experiencing these shifts without even realizing exactly what was happening. And I did share it with her. I explained it to her. I. I never sent her direct energy healing.
And when she bought a ticket to the event, I panicked. I was like, oh my gosh. It was that moment of, you know, the memes that go around that say like, when the person walks in, who's been the topic of all of your therapy sessions. That's what I envisioned. That was the flash that went through my mind and I thought, oh, sh what am I gonna do?
And I was a little bit nervous about how it would happen. Um, but she was so excited and. She came to the event, it was an intimate experience. She came a little late, of course, but she came and she enjoyed it and she looked like a Buddha sitting on her mat, experiencing an energy healing transmission. And we had a tea ceremony that I invited and, um, hired somebody to come in and do a tea ceremony For us, it was a deeper, more nourishing Mother's Day experience that I envisioned.
I wanted to do it every year. So the first one was in 2023, and it was the first time that I did energy work directly on my mother, and I got to experience the fruit of my labor that I had been working on for all these years in that day. And in that moment, I didn't realize that day. I didn't realize how potent and how important that day would later be.
My thought was, okay, this is the first time it's gonna be intimate. Next year it's gonna be something different. And then I had no way of knowing that the next year she would be gone and I would be too deep in the thick of grief to host another one just yet. And even this year, I'm just too thick in it that I'm not ready to do that going forward when I'm ready.
I would love to be able to, you know, do more of that, but point being. I share a lot of how we got to that place
because my intention is that if you've also had a less than Hallmark relationship with your mother or other parent, that it inspires you to free yourself. Whether or not you have a relationship with them and whether or not they ever know, they might not ever know that you have forgiven them, that you do.
We forgive for ourselves, not for the other party. So this isn't something that you pick up the phone and make a phone call and and forgive necessarily, or that you go to therapy together and hash it out or go to coffee and talk that none of that is required. It's optional. It's not required. That's not what forgiveness looks like, and I didn't know that.
All of these years, it's taken me a very long time to learn and then to experience. Forgiveness.
So wrapping up, what I invite you to do as Mother's Day approaches is honor yourself and your mother relationship in any way that feels good to you. And. Screw all of the societal standards. If you don't like brunch, don't brunch. If you don't like bottomless mimosas, don't bottomless mimosa. Do whatever the hell you want to do.
My only request is that you allow yourself to feel the feelings and don't numb out. By all means, if you want to have some wine or a mimosa, go for it. But take a moment. Take a few moments to sit with the feelings before you have that wine or mimosa. Allow them to move through you.
And what I hope that you can also remember is that as mothers, we were women first. We are women before we become mother. And our mothers were women before they became mothers. And womanhood is nuanced, and our experience in this life is multifaceted and is nuanced, and so can you allow yourself to remember that and to honor who you were before you became mom.
I know that Mother's Day is all about honoring mothers, and I'm here for that. Honor yourself as a person first.
Then as a parting gift for you, I have a meditation that is not gonna be on video for you. If you would like to experience an energy healing transmission. Specifically through your mother line, and this will be a version of what we experienced at the Mother Decoded Heal, heal the Mother Line event that I had two years ago.
But it's a gift. It's on the podcast for you. You can come back and listen to it as often as you like. Again, healing is not like a one and done thing. This isn't, um, like you do one healing meditation and experience one healing transmission, and you snap your fingers and you're all better. It doesn't work like that.
However, there are shifts each time, each time you take a step. Whether that's through this tool or some other tool, there are shifts. And that's something I talk about in the book is all of those little things that were shifts for me that brought me to this point. Um, so this is my gift to you for Mother's Day.