Honestly, Sandie

I climbed a mountain and I turned around and I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills till the landslide brought me down.

It is almost noon.
I have a meeting with a friend.
If it were not for that, I would still be under the covers letting sleep hold me down.
Sleep is the quiet place I run to when I do not want to face what my heart is whispering.

But here I am. Awake.
Standing on shifting ground.

The kind of shift that does not roar.
It moves quietly beneath your feet.
A landslide does not always sound like disaster.
Sometimes it sounds like your own breath.
Sometimes it begins in the silence of your kitchen while you stand barefoot and realize you are in the middle of change.

At least it has pulled me into words.

I am in the shower.
The steam is swirling around me. I am in a time crunch and need to hurry to get to my meeting. I left my phone on the counter as to not tempt me into scrolling. Of course, a deep thought hits when I don’t have a way to take a note down.
I whisper the thought again and again and fixate on the face wash bottle and the shampoo trying to concrete the thought with an item so it will not slip away before I get to my phone.

I am not a lousy mom. That was the phrase I was clinging to, not as a reminder, but as the token to not forget the thought.

I hold on to those words like a rope while everything underneath me moves. I am not a lousy mom.
Because I know what lousy looks like.
I grew up studying it like a map I refused to follow. When I fall short and fail my kids it cuts deep because I never wanted them to ever feel like I did.

Is it cruel to say that. Maybe.
Will she ever read this. Probably not.
And if she did… I would call it a metaphor.
Because being real would mean facing her own reflection and I know she will not. (I don’t know that she holds the capacity…depth…self awareness…? This all sounds so mean.)

I wonder if my mom ever lay awake like this. Like I am. The thing I can’t escape right now.
Chest tight. Brain spinning.
Replay after replay of a fight with my eldest.

No. I know she did not.

I remember the night she caught me sneaking out at fifteen.
She saw me. She knew. I saw that she caught my bed empty and my window open. I saw that she locked and I came in through the unlocked front door instead of climbing back in.
But she left for work the next morning as if nothing had happened.
No conversation. No curiosity. No care.

The mountain was already shifting beneath us but she never climbed back up to meet me.

And yet the older I get the more I can see her story sitting behind mine.

I could tell my story and paint her as the villain.
I could stack my memories like stones and build a case for every crack she left in me.
But that is not the story I want to tell.

Because the truth is I had a single mom who was just trying to survive.
Her best was rough and unfinished.
Best is always subjective.

I remember the little things the way some people remember lullabies.
The hum of the vacuum.
The paper route mornings.
The coffee pot at Marie Callender’s.
The ice-cream sandwich.
Her quiet escape into crossword puzzles and computer games when the world got too loud.

There is always more to the story.
Pain does not erase humanity.
It complicates it.
It carves layers where judgment wants to flatten everything.

I can name what hurt without setting fire to the woman who raised me.
I can acknowledge the damage without denying her bruises.
She was a product of her own landslide.
And somewhere in all of that, so was I.

I am not here to bash.
I am here to break cycles.
To stand in the middle of the story and tell it honestly.
To hold both the wound and the why.

I remember her anger.
But I also remember her trying.

And that is why I do not call her a lousy mom.

Because behind the frustration and the silence and the things she did not know how to give, there was a woman carrying the weight of a world she never got a break from. She worked double shifts and came home smelling like coffee and tired feet. She stretched what was never enough. And while other people might have childhood memories of family vacations or dinners at the table, what I have burned into my mind is my mom on the floor, pulling the hair out of the vacuum brush. Over and over.

She didn’t choose to teach me that.
She never sat me down and said this is how you keep a house together.
But that image became a staple in my head.

Years later, I was standing in my own living room, cleaning my own vacuum, and a different kind of landslide came for me. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet and heavy and it cracked something open.

In that moment I saw her.
Not as the mother I needed.
But as the woman she was.

A single mom holding things together in the only ways she knew how.
Keeping the small parts of the world from unraveling while the big ones were already slipping.

I don’t think my kids have ever seen me clean the vacuum.
They don’t have that same picture of me etched into their memory.
But I have it of her. And now I understand why.

There was survival in her hands long before softness.
There was exhaustion stitched into every corner of her life.
There was a kind of love she didn’t know how to speak out loud.

I can hold both truths at once.
The ache of what she could not give me and the quiet evidence that she showed up in the only way she knew how.
That does not erase the hurt.
But it keeps me from turning her into something she wasn’t.

This fight with my daughter is not just a bump.
It is a boulder moving.

She is not just my child.
She is my best friend.
We share everything.
She borrows my clothes and my makeup and my underwear if she runs out.
We breathe in sync most days.

So when something breaks between us it is not a crack.
It is the mountain splitting.

The difference between me and my mother is clear.
She would be standing in a line somewhere talking to a stranger about my pain like it is free conversation.
She would hand out pieces of my story like sugar packets across a counter.
But she would never sit across from me and look me in the eye.

Me. I cannot sleep.
I cannot shrug it off.
I play Gilmore Girls on repeat because silence is too loud.

My love refuses to stay quiet.
This is what love looks like when it is real.
Messy. Inconvenient.
Loud in the dark.

A landslide brought it down.

This song was written on a mountain at a crossroads.
Well I have been afraid of changing because I have built my life around you.

Motherhood has that same echo.
You build your world around these little humans.
Then they grow.
They change.
You change.

The ground shifts again.

Time makes you bolder.
Even children get older.
And I am getting older too.

It is one thing to sing along.
It is another thing to live it.

Motherhood is the wildest ride.
It is raising your kids while still raising the little girl inside you.
It is trying to steady the ground beneath them while your own slides away.
It is learning how to be the parent you needed while grieving the one you did not have.

I used to think being a good mom meant being flawless.
But I know better now.

It means being the one who feels it.
The one who shows up.
The one who lies awake and loves too much.
The one who refuses to let silence build walls.

This landslide is my reminder.
I am not my mother.
I am not a lousy mom.
I am a woman learning as I go.
Still growing up.
Still figuring it out.
Still holding love like a lifeline as the ground moves beneath me.

Not every landslide is born from the earth.
Some are set in motion by people.
By what they do.
By what they don’t.
By the way a single moment can loosen something buried deep, until it all starts to move.

And maybe that’s what it has always been.
A lifetime of small triggers.
Some loud.
Some quiet.
Some she caused without ever meaning to.
Some I’ve caused without even realizing.

But even when people set the ground in motion, it doesn’t mean everything is lost.
The earth shifts. The shape changes.
And sometimes, in the settling, we finally see the landscape clearly for the first time.

I think about the vacuum.
That quiet, ordinary image I carry like proof that she was trying.
Not perfect. Not gentle. But trying.
And maybe someday my kids will have a small, ordinary image of me too.
Something I don’t even notice I’m doing.
Something that will find them years later and bring their own landslide with it.

Because love isn’t always built in the big moments.
Sometimes it hides in the smallest ones.
Sometimes it shakes the ground without warning.
And sometimes, even when we are the ones who trigger it, love still finds a way to settle.

Inspired by “Landslide,” written by Stevie Nicks and performed by Fleetwood Mac. The lyrics quoted here belong to their song. I have borrowed only what was needed to hold my own reflection.