Wednesday 19 February 2025 marked one year since I became Mum’s full-time carer. I was very conscious of this day approaching, and wanted to acknowledge it in some way, as the last year has been huge in terms of both healing and growing. 

This wasn’t the only anniversary that I’d been aware of lately. On 3 March 2025 it was 10 years since my dad died, and in April it was 50 years since Mum and Dad bought this house.  The house I grew up in. The house Mum and I are living in now. 

The relevance of this is that while I’ve been here, I’ve been clearing out the loft, and I’ve dislodged and uncovered an ancestral history that has stopped me in my tracks for full afternoons, reading letters and diaries, trying to match photos to family lineages, and old, interesting, and often beautiful items to people. I’ve felt the energy of many of these ancestors ‘come alive’ as I’ve liberated them from decades in dark boxes in dark corners of a dark loft. And so, I decided to mark my one year anniversary with a celebration to honour the ancestors that continue to live through Mum and I. 

It was a beautiful memento in time, witnessed by Gillian at Remember Love, with tears and laughter, sadness and joy, the gift of memories loved, and family members ‘seen’ and finally given expression. 

Mum and I continue on, our relationship coming closer and closer as we both heal from childhood conditioning, suppressed emotions, and generational hurts that have lived on inside us. That’s the emotion we’ve both been releasing over the past year – Mum unconsciously and me consciously. 

I started this self reflection, and what became this series of three articles, during August 2024, after my first six months as Mum’s full-time carer. I’ve been very conscious, very self aware, for most of my life, but mastering mindfulness, mastering ‘self’... well, the last 12 months blew the lid off my inner sanctuary and took me deeper than I’ve ever gone before. We grow up as victims of our environment, conditioned to conform, and to be what everybody needs us to be. Our creativity is stifled during our early years as our beings are moulded to fit in with other people’s notions of who and what we’re meant to be. Mastering mindfulness takes us away from all of that into the deeper recesses of our soul, into the truest truths about ourselves. It takes us into our own sovereign being, our source of power, our confidence, strength, and inner knowing. 

I’ve spoken of Mum’s dementia throughout this whole story. But this isn’t just about dementia, nor is it really just about Mum’s and my relationship, or my ability to be mindful. Every single one of us grows up with energetic and ancestral wounds, sacred hurts that we carry unknowingly, and therefore unconsciously throughout our lives. We add to these hurts and wounds with our own suppressed emotions, the feelings that got stuck when we weren’t allowed to make a noise, or cry, or be angry, or laugh at the wrong time, or look out the window, or speak loudly or honestly, or feel frightened .. the feelings that got stuck when we were silenced, when we weren’t allowed to be ourselves throughout our childhood and adolescence. As we learned what was acceptable and what wasn’t, we also learned to conceal our emotions. We held ourselves back, kept ourselves quiet, and numbed who we really were. Instead of growing up as free and creative human beings, living our unique and authentic paths, we grew up inhibited. Shaped, configured, and sculpted to be like everybody else. And along the way, we all found our coping mechanisms.   

Mum was a creator. Most alive in her right brain. A pianist. A musician. A seamstress. A cook and a dinner and party host. An artist. A designer. A dancer. She was a primary school teacher. She created choirs of children who were so disadvantaged they often arrived at school needing food and clothing. She taught them to sing, to love, and to smile. They sang to the elderly in care homes. They sang for the community at Christmas. She gave them a voice, when otherwise they had none. She was co-founder of the 1st Tillicoultry Girls Brigade and had them all singing, acting, and achieving too. Mum was at her happiest playing the piano and giving a voice to the world.   

We don’t value creativity in our society, so academically Mum was told – and learned to believe – that she wasn’t good enough. She never realised or valued what she brought to people. Her own deep emotional trauma, a childhood of not being ‘seen’ for the gift that she was and had, is what she has been expressing in the last twelve months. As she loses her inhibitions, the emotions that she wasn’t allowed to feel or give expression to throughout her life .. they have to come out. Mum is not unique in this. A lifetime of feeling weak, less than, not good enough, of having to strive, to prove herself, pretend that she was stronger than she felt inside .. it resembles so many of our stories. Yet the reality is that her life was one of service to others. She brought joy to so many, in one way or another.   

My first year of looking after Mum has opened my heart in ways I could never have imagined, and could never properly articulate. It has sent me searching deep into my soul for my kindness, my grace, my humility, and for ways I can serve her more authentically, more gently, more compassionately, and more patiently. My role as a carer has become about me. Not in a selfish or self serving way, but in an immensely liberating way for I have released so much of my own suppressed emotion from my body that I feel spacious and emotionally free in a way that I never have. And from that place of wholeness, I can be there more fully for Mum.  

I can’t help but wonder – what if this whole journey was meant for us? What if our lives as carers were actually about our own healing and personal mastery? 

Because there is one more fact I’ve not yet shared in this memoir, this journey to mastering mindfulness. One more awesome truth I’ve not yet imparted. And it is this. Since I let go of all the emotion that I did in November, Mum has been peaceful and calm, and I have been fine and quite genuinely coping. For the past three months I’ve had less help than I’ve had all year, yet I have achieved more around the house, had more quality time with Mum, been calmer, slower, and found things so much easier, and started creating a daily practice for myself because I now know exactly how much mastering me helps Mum. 

It’s still a soul-searching, deep inner journey as each day brings its own set of precious moments and challenges. But I find that the more I look within myself, the more ready I am to help create more precious moments. For example, when Mum shouts on me first thing in the morning – because that’s the time she’s most confused and disorientated – I can either go into her bedroom and look down at her when I speak to her, tell her what’s going on, and leave the room, or I can sit down next to her, or get into bed beside her, and speak to her eye to eye while I hold her hand and tell her what’s going on, and have a wee chat in the warmth and timelessness of the present moment. Mastering mindfulness opens your heart to creating these moments, to taking these opportunities, to creating better experiences and nicer, more meaningful memories.   

I think I thought I had accepted Mum’s dementia, and all that it meant, a long time ago. But I realised I had only accepted it in my head. When, after nearly a year, I accepted it within my whole body, I was more able to be fully present with her and able to better meet her emotional needs as well as her physical needs. True caring is so much more than just being there to meet someone’s physical needs.  

I haven’t had a melt down since November. I do have moments of frustration, and of anger, and I do still stop when something’s not felt right, or gone well, and look at why, and what I can do to create a better experience the next time.  

As Mum declines, and the support I had last year has changed, I’m constantly reviewing and adjusting from day to day, constantly adapting how best to work for Mum, and constantly creating different and better solutions. I’m learning that the more grounded, humble, accepting, compassionate, and gentle I naturally become, the more awe I have as I observe both of our experiences of this part of our lives we’re living together. I feel as if we’ve been through the worst, because now that I’m as aware and mindful as I am, I’m becoming better at letting go of my own stuff, and as a result am in a better place to hold space for whatever hurts and wounds need to pour out of Mum. 

It’s that ripple effect. It’s energetic. When we stop mindlessly spilling our stuff onto each other, and stop mindlessly reacting to the stuff that others spill onto us, and focus on ourselves instead, we start to become truly liberated from each other’s baggage and get on with owning our own emotions, accepting others where they’re at, and properly loving each other. When we remember that we choose this role, and that nobody is doing anything to us, we can go forward in our power as accountable, inspired, creative, self aware carers and true champions and advocates for our loved ones. 

And that, in a nutshell, is mastering mindfulness.