Leisha There are losses that are visible, and there are losses that live quietly inside the body, shaping breath and sleep and the way a woman walks through her own history. This is one of the quiet ones. I also know that what is happening inside me is expressing this story and healing this story.
There was a time when I believed motherhood would be the one relationship immune to fracture, the one bond that could bend but never sever. I now understand that love does not guarantee proximity, and devotion does not guarantee agreement. A child can choose distance. A daughter can choose estrangement. And a mother must learn to stand without the mirror she once relied on.
I know who I was.
I know what I gave.
That knowing has had to become internal rather than relational.
What makes this grief complex is not only the absence. It is the perception. When a daughter rewrites the narrative of her childhood, when she decides that your love felt like harm, the blow lands in identity itself. Motherhood is not a role one performs in isolation. It is a relational identity. To be told, implicitly or explicitly, that you failed in the most sacred arena cuts deeply.
I have had to discern what belongs to me and what does not. I have had to separate self-examination from self-erasure. There are always places to grow, places to soften, places to acknowledge imperfection. But there is also a line where self-doubt becomes self-destruction. I have had to find that line and stand on it.
Inside the framework of conflict and healing that I study, the true shift does not happen when the other person understands. It does not happen when they apologize. It does not happen when they return. The switch happens when the nervous system truly feels that identity is intact regardless of perception.
My identity as a mother does not depend on my daughter’s current interpretation of me.
That sentence has taken years to inhabit.
What I have been carrying is not only grief. It is a layered conflict. There is the mother–child rejection, which strikes at the biological core. There is the moral injustice, which protests against being defined by a narrative that feels incomplete or unfair. There is the self-doubt, which whispers in the night and asks whether you missed something essential.
Anger has been part of this journey. I have learned that anger is often dignity defending itself. It rises when something sacred feels misrepresented. Yet my body does not need me to win an argument. It does not need a courtroom victory. It needs me to release responsibility.
She is free to misunderstand me. I do not require her understanding to know who I am. I accept that this is reality, even if I do not approve of it.
Acceptance is not endorsement. It is the end of internal resistance.
There is a subtle but powerful difference between releasing someone and abandoning them. Releasing is not indifference. It is the cessation of management. It is saying, I release you from my need to fix you. I release myself from saving you. I release the outcome.
I can love without controlling.
I can grieve without collapsing.
I can be intact without being understood.
The case is closed, not because the heart feels nothing, but because I no longer wish to keep the trial running inside my body.
In the midst of this estrangement, something else has grown.
Living Ground became more than a project. It became a place where nurturing could continue without resistance. Soil does not reinterpret your love. Seeds do not question your intentions. When you tend land, when you feed people, when you build something rooted in service, the giving has direction and reception.
I am aware that some might say the Project became my baby. There is truth in that, though not in a replacement sense. It is not a substitute child. It is an expression of generativity. When a relational identity fractures, the instinct to nurture does not disappear. It seeks a place to land.
Living Ground is not owned by my bloodline. It was never designed as inheritance in the traditional sense. It is for the people, for the soil, for the community that gathers around it. I do not want it to be a burden of obligation placed on someone who does not resonate with it. I want it to remain what it was intended to be, a commons of nourishment and learning.
This is, in a quiet way, my testimony.
If one day I am gone and someone reads this, know that I did not build this out of bitterness. I built it out of love. I built it because nurturing is part of my nature, and when one channel closed, I chose not to close with it.
I know who I was.
I know what I gave.
My daughter’s perception does not define my identity. My integrity is not up for debate. I am more than a mother, though being a mother shaped me profoundly. I am a whole woman whose life cannot be reduced to one relationship, however sacred.
To release biological responsibility does not mean to erase love. It means to return the other person to their own path. It means trusting that they, too, must walk through their own conflicts and revelations without my management.
There is grief here, yes. There is also steadiness.
I am intact.
And Living Ground will continue, not as an inheritance of blood, but as a living testament to who I was, how I loved, and what I chose to cultivate in this lifetime.
Author note: Within the framework of New German Medicine, the body is understood to respond with biological precision to specific emotional shocks, and certain tissues are said to activate when a woman experiences what is described as a “nest” conflict, a profound distress connected to someone she feels responsible for nurturing, protecting, or holding together. This type of conflict often involves a child or a deeply bonded family member, and it is not framed as ordinary sadness but as an unexpected rupture that strikes at relational identity. In this model, the physical response is interpreted not as the body turning against itself, but as an adaptive program linked to care, attachment, and responsibility, particularly when the role of protector or nurturer feels threatened or destabilized.
