Forgiving Our Mothers

As my team and I prepare our Mother's Day campaigns, I've been sitting with something I've never shared publicly.

For nearly seven years, my mother and I were estranged. Every year when this holiday approached, I still had to do my job — promote jewelry, write about the gift of mothers — while privately dreading every word of it. Those years were painful in a way that's hard to put into words.

We found our way back to each other. And the healing that happened — for both of us — is something I've wanted to talk about for a long time. Not as an expert. Not as someone who has it all figured out. But as a daughter who has been somewhere very hard and found her way through.

If this Mother's Day finds you in a complicated place with your own mother — whether you're estranged, grieving, or simply carrying the weight of a relationship that has never been simple — I want you to feel seen. You are not alone. And there is hope.

My Mother's Story

When my mother was 5 years old, her mother died. She grew up in Guatemala City as the youngest of three children, and the family told her it was a tragic accident. A car crash.

But something never lined up. As she got older, she searched — newspaper clippings, conversations with neighbors, quiet questions to anyone who might know more. The answers were always evasive, always slightly off.

Her father left — went to New York City to make money and sent what he could — and the three children were left in the care of someone who was not kind to them. The stories she has shared about those years are too heartbreaking to repeat here.

Fast forward thirty-some years. She's in her mid-thirties. I'm under ten years old. And she finally learns the truth.

Her mother was murdered. And her murderer took their own life.

She had spent her entire childhood, her entire young adulthood, building herself up in the absence of a mother she never got to know — and carrying a grief she didn't even have the right shape of yet, because no one would tell her what had actually happened.

I didn't know any of this during the years we were estranged. I only learned it when we began to find our way back to each other. And when I did, everything I thought I understood about my mother shifted.

My Story

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August of 2005. I was 15 years old — it was the second week of high school — and I had no idea I would never see some of my friends again.

My parents sent me to stay with friends in Miami while they focused on rebuilding. Months later, when I was allowed to come home, I was put to work — and I was glad to be there. I was full of purpose. Learning the family business, being of real use, contributing to something that mattered.

As I grew into the work, I was given more authority and responsibility. I could think like my mother, carry the business the way she wanted. But I also had my own ideas. When I began implementing new technology and different approaches, the tension started. The rule was clear, even unspoken: the traditional ways had always worked. Deviation was criticism.

To protect the relationship, I quit.

What I didn't anticipate was that leaving the business would be interpreted as betrayal. The very relationship I left to protect became the relationship I lost.

The cut that went deepest: after I left and started building my own brand, I offered to wholesale some of my new designs to my mother's store. She passed. Then I discovered she had copied several of them.

I couldn't speak to her after that. I was absolutely crushed, not just hurt. Shaken in a way that went to my foundation. This was my mother. And I had given up the security of the family business to build something of my own, and she had taken from it.

We didn't talk for nearly seven years. As an only child of an immigrant family with no extended family in the United States, that silence was its own kind of devastation.

How I Forgave Her

The first thing that pulled me back wasn't my mother. It was my dad.

He was collateral damage in the falling out between my mother and me, and I missed him dearly. As we slowly reconnected, my mother began to open up. She told me the tragic truth about her mother’s death. She apologized, genuinely, imperfectly, although not covering everything that had hurt me. But it was real. She was trying.

By that point, I had already done years of work on myself. Losing my family, my anchor, my identity, the people I had built myself around had forced me to find out who I was without them. That process was hard and it was also, I see now, one of the greatest gifts of my life.

In that work, I came to understand something about my mother wound. The core belief I had carried quietly, beneath everything, was that I was never enough for her. That belief didn't come from nowhere. It came from the way she showed up for me, which came from the way no one had shown up for her, which came from wounds that were not her fault and not mine.

If I wanted to stop carrying that belief, I was going to have to be the one to put it down. I couldn't wait for her to do it for me or with me. 

She did the best she could with the wounds she had. I know that now in a way I couldn't have known it then. When people are hurting, it is hard to love freely. It is hard to love without conditions when most of the love you have received has come with them. Or worse, if you’ve never experienced it for yourself. You have no idea what real unconditional love looks like. 

The turning point for me was when I stopped looking to her to fill the space and started filling it myself. Learning to be my own best friend, my own witness, my own source of the love I had been waiting for. That voice, that steadiness, that unconditional warmth I found inside myself? That is the divine connection we have to the universe, to God, to our Divine Authority (however that looks like for you). That is the God-given energy that flows through all of us, available to every one of us, if we are willing to get quiet enough to hear it.

By the time my mother shared her story with me, I had already forgiven her. Not completely, not all at once, but enough. Enough to listen. Enough to let what she said land. And what she shared cracked something open in me that I didn't know was still closed.

A Gift for You

If I could go back and sit with the young woman I was at twenty — the one who felt betrayed, unseen, not enough — here is what I would tell her.

Your mother's soul is pure. Her mind and body have been through things she may not yet have the capacity to heal. She is not her wounds, even when her wounds are all you can see.

Healing begins with accepting the past as it was — not as it should have been, not as you needed it to be. Ask yourself honestly: what beliefs did this experience create in me? What did I decide about myself — consciously or not — as a result of what happened? Write them down. They cannot be healed until they are named.

Journal about how it felt. Write without editing yourself. You are not producing a document — you are moving energy. Let the feelings be as big as they actually are, knowing that they are just information, just experience flowing through you and out of you onto the page. If you need someone with you for that, ask.

Then burn the journal. Or bury it. Offer it back to the earth in whatever way feels right to you. Thank it — genuinely — for what it held. Because the pain you carried holds within it a gift: the capacity to understand, to hold space for others, to be the person for someone else that you needed and didn't have.

Write a letter to your mother. Whether or not you ever give it to her. Whether or not she is still alive. Say what you need to say. Forgiveness is not for her — it is for you. Real forgiveness does not excuse what happened. It removes the power those memories have over you. It melts the chokehold. It gives those events a purpose beyond simply hurting you.

And if you are estranged and wondering whether there is any possibility of repair: there may be. I didn't know there was. There might also not be — and peace is still available to you either way. Healing and inner peace does not require her participation. It only requires yours.

My mother and I are not the same people we were. Neither is our relationship. What we have now is not what I lost — it is something we built from the broken pieces of our past, slowly, imperfectly, with more grace than I thought either of us had.

I don't know where you are with your own mother as you read this. Maybe you are in the middle of the estrangement. Maybe you are years out, still carrying something you haven't fully understood. Maybe you have already done this work and you're reading this for a friend, a daughter, a version of yourself you want to honor.

Wherever you are: I see you. This is hard. May my words offer you comfort and assurance that you are more capable of healing than you know. 

With love,

Cristy

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