Grief in the Belly, Grief in the Heart

A guest post about what you learn in the Motherless Club.

Friends, this is the first guest post on Pickle! I’m thrilled that my friend Jill Holter wanted to share what she’s learned about herself and her body through her mother’s passing. As we come into the Mother’s Day month, I know there are as many feelings as brunches, and far more complex stories about the maternal than we typically see written. It’s a privilege to share this with you.

We have at least two more stories from other women being edited in the wings, stay tuned!

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There’s a club I belong to which includes countless other women my age. We don’t recruit or hold official meetings, there’s a definite hazing period, and the dues are paid in our bodies. No one really wants to be a member, but thank god for the women who are.

I entered the Motherless Club at the end of 2021. It had been a point of pride keeping my mother Dolores alive during the pandemic. Because my dad had died two years earlier, my mom was isolated in her home, suffering from grief and dementia, and I was her only person. For all the work I did to protect us, getting ALL the shots and staying healthy, in the end, her heart just gave out. She was 92. 

Our relationship was complex, and every single complexity came to the surface through her last year, and last days dying. I experienced her lifelong eating disorder that I could finally identify when I watched it rear its ugly head, even in her final moments. She put much of her fear of food and fatness on me my whole life -  weight loss regimes, fat-shaming, weight loss charts for all to see in the bathroom, and subsequent punishments -  but somehow I could not name it, could not fully identify it, until she passed. It was like a lightbulb moment and a huge shock of grief, all at once.

To me, my body is a wonderland. And it is also a mess. It’s strong and resilient—it has carried, birthed, and nursed six babies. I know what it’s like to go to war within this body, and it bears the scars of grief, sadness, joy, exhilaration, fear, power, and so much more. It was built with many bowls of macaroni and cheese, countless glasses of wine, slice after slice of soft white bread, and a million vegetables that surely would never make me fat. Food was both friend and foe, used as a weapon against my mother, “I’ll show her, I’ll starve myself and show her how skinny I could be” along with “Screw that, I don’t care if I gain weight and lose her approval.” Harming my body to show my mom who was boss harmed only me.

As an adopted child, I did not come from my mother’s body. But our physical beings were so closely linked that watching her suffer put me in her body, and I could feel every ounce of her battle. Even in her last days, the delirium from dementia pulled her into the “should I or should I not eat?” vortex and it was hard not to be pulled in. Explaining it to the nurses and hospice workers felt like salt in a dry mouth, it was so raw and embarrassing. Her 92 year old heart was failing, but maybe she was still fat? (Spoiler: she never was). When she finally let go and died, our physical link was broken and there was relief I didn’t know I could feel. I went back into therapy, got some excellent health coaching from Stephanie Meyer to right a few wrongs in my heart and mind, and practiced yoga breath work while deciding to let my body rest into itself. 

For once in 50+ years, I chose not to focus on what I was eating, only how I felt. 

What happened was, I settled into a beautiful size 16. I ditched all my clothes that didn’t fit and slowly replaced my wardrobe. Numbers are bullshit. And, hello menopause. That cruel bitch showed up and took the curl from my hair, thickened my middle, and amped up my inherited arthritis. Lucky me, I skipped a lot of the other symptoms.

Then a little more than a year ago, my no-big-deal irregular heartbeat took a lap around the block and woke me up in the middle of the night going 160 bpm. I felt so sick. My darling husband Karl drove me with GREAT PURPOSE to the hospital where I told them I was dying and they told me I was not. After a few rounds of IV beta blockers, they knocked me out and shocked my heart back to rhythm and sent me home. Atrial fibrillation is now on my list of crosses to bear, but thank god I get to take a little pill every night and mostly be fine.

Those many glasses of wine I mentioned earlier? Bye. Turns out alcohol is one of the worst things for A-fib. It also makes GERD (acid reflux) worse, which I’d already been dealing with for a couple decades. It didn’t take me long to cut back. What had been two or three drinks per night became two or three per week. Then one. Now, I’m in the not-quite-sober crowd and dang, if it didn’t fix a multitude of ills in my weary body. Turns out alcohol messed with my heart, my gut, my mind, my psyche, my intuition, my creativity, my skin. Feels like freedom. Though, not going to lie, I miss it sometimes.

It took my mom dying for me to learn some big truths about my body. I am not defined by my shape or weight. There are things out of my control that will come for me as I age. Being in my later 50s now I get to decide what I will allow to happen to me and what I will accept as fate. 

My mom fought illness and dying like it was her full-time job, and she made it to 92+ so I guess it worked for her. At what cost, though? Being eternally hungry, always on a diet, tracking every morsel, avoiding the doctor and any talk of aging.

Letting go of my mom helped me let go of the generational trauma of simply being a woman.  How can we fix that so when our daughters help us cross over, they will be left with much less of that trauma?

In my own life, I’m dressing my new body with color and confidence. My amazing 19 and 21 year old daughters have seen a difference. I’m bigger than I’ve been, but I love getting dressed. I’m choosing to walk and hold myself differently. Elsa and Sally see me smile in the mirror, take many more photos and never want to edit them. They tell me my ass is thick and I realize this is a Gen Z compliment I can glow about. I’m caring for my health, my heart and my body in different ways, and it’s not about a scale or a calorie or a double chin. I feel less and less of my mother’s disapproval as the months and years pass.

Those of us in the Motherless Club can and will do better for our girls and boys and next generations of people with beautiful, complicated bodies.