Nobody shouted. That is the thing she cannot get anybody to understand.
There was no falling out, no letter, no Christmas anybody missed. Her mother still rings on Sundays and they talk for about forty minutes, and the forty minutes are perfectly warm.
They are also, now, about the garden, her sister's hip, the weather, a program they both watch, and what the neighbors are doing with their extension. That is the list. It took about two years to settle into that shape after what happened to her, and it has not moved in nine.
Her mother has never criticized it. She simply went quiet on the subject in a particular way, and after enough of those particular silences a person stops raising a thing, and after enough years of not raising it the not raising becomes ordinary, and then it becomes the relationship.
And she cannot grieve it, because there is nothing to point at. Nobody would recognize her loss as a loss. She would sound absurd saying it out loud: my mother rings every week and we are close, and I have lost her.
If your closest person narrowed without anybody doing anything wrong, sit down at the table. Nothing about your mother, or about you, is going to be judged here.
A loss with no event is still a loss
Let us say the plain thing first, because nine years of nobody saying it is the reason this has festered.
Something was taken off that relationship. The most important thing that has ever happened to her cannot be mentioned to the person she has told everything to since she was four years old, and she has been carrying that alone for nine years while both of them are still perfectly kind to each other.
That is a bereavement of a particular kind, and the absence of an event does not make it smaller. It makes it harder, because there is no funeral for it and no date and nobody sends anything.
You are not inventing this. Nothing about a loss with no argument in it has ever made it less real to God. I am not saying that to validate a feeling. The written word says thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle; are they not in thy book (Psalm 56:8), which describes a God who keeps a record of grief nobody else is counting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman on a Sunday phone call.
He counts the ones nobody else counts
Here is the part that turned this for me, and it does not put one thing on your mother.
Read what the verse says God does with tears that had no audience.
Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8
Tellest. That is counting, in the old sense, the way a man tells coins. He is described as keeping a tally of a grief that nobody around the writer had acknowledged.
And then the bottle, and then the book. Three images stacked in one verse, all of them about a loss being recorded rather than dismissed, and none of them requiring the loss to be legible to anyone else first.
You are grieving something He has already written down, and Scripture gives it three images in a single line. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it to a woman who has never once been able to say it out loud.
This does not decide who was right
Something has to be said very plainly here, and it is the most important sentence on this page.
Nothing here rules on it. Your mother's care about what happened to you was real care, and it came from somewhere honest, and she has not been unkind to you in nine years. What came to you was real too. This page is not going to hand you a verdict that makes her the one who was wrong, and it will not hand you one that makes you wrong either.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the qualifier as much as lieth in you concedes that some of it does not lie in you at all, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a settled verdict, who lets a woman keep both her mother and the truth.
And if these nine years have cost more than the people at that table know, if sleep has gone, if the Sunday calls have begun to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So here is the turn, and it is not a promise that the list gets longer.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. The written word says put thou my tears into thy bottle (Psalm 56:8), where the grief is collected rather than assessed, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a resolution between the two of you, who carries what you have not been able to say.
I cannot tell you whether that subject ever opens between you again, and I am not going to guess at it. Nobody honest would. What I can tell you is that a loss nobody else can see is already written in His book, and that you have not been exaggerating for nine years.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the standing under these words is His rather than your own. You speak under His will and not yours, and what God does next, and when, is His to decide, however He answers.
- Nine years of safe subjects, you are a real loss and you are not a thing I am inventing because nobody left. Psalm 56 says He tells my wanderings and puts my tears into His bottle, so the grief was recorded before anybody else agreed to see it, and the Holy Spirit has counted every Sunday of it. In the name of Jesus I stop calling you nothing.
- Rule that a loss needs an argument to count, you are not what God says about me and you are not sitting at this table on Sunday. Romans 12 says live peaceably as much as lieth in you, which concedes that some of it never lay with me at all, and His Spirit holds me steady without a verdict. I am grieving this properly now.
- Father, You keep my tears in Your bottle and my wanderings in Your book, and Psalm 56 gives the same loss three images in one line. I thank You that my mother is still mine and that what came to me was still real, and Your Spirit was present in the room when it thinned. This was real and it cost me, and I can hold both without deciding which of us was wrong.
Psalm 56:8
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
