What I've Learned After 35 Years Without My Mom

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Tamsen Show

Episode: What I've Learned After 35 Years Without My Mom

Host: Tamsen Fadal
Date: May 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this deeply personal and empathetic episode, Tamsen Fadal reflects on 35 years of living without her mother, who passed from breast cancer when Tamsen was 20. With Mother's Day approaching—a day that society often sells as joyful and uncomplicated—she addresses the nuanced realities of grief, longing, and the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. Whether your mother is gone, your relationship is strained, or you’re wrestling with grief of another kind, Tamsen opens up about her ongoing journey and shares wisdom, comfort, and tangible guidance for navigating holidays and everyday life without the mother you needed or lost.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Many Faces of Mother’s Day and Grief

• Complicated Realities:
  • Tamsen acknowledges that Mother’s Day is not universally happy, especially for those who have lost their mothers or have painful, nonexistent, or complex relationships with them.
    • “If your mom is gone, or if your relationship with her is painful or complicated or non-existent, you can feel incredibly alone in the middle of all this, like everyone else got something that you didn’t.” (01:57)
• Personal Story:
  • She lost her mom at 20, soon after relocating to a new city with her family:
    • “My mom died when I was 20 years old from breast cancer… within the second month of us being [in Tampa], she relapsed. And before we could even understand what was happening… she was diagnosed again. And then she was gone.” (03:02)

The Nature and Course of Grief

• Non-Linear Journey:
  • Grief persists in unexpected ways and doesn't resolve on a schedule.
    • “The grief doesn’t follow a schedule or a timeline. It doesn’t resolve and file itself away after a few years. It changes shape.” (05:01)
• Stages Myth:
  • Challenges the idea that grief is orderly or that it ever truly ends.
    • “I thought it was supposed to go in those stages of grief… But it doesn’t work like that. ... Grief moves more like an ocean than it does a calendar. It ebbs and flows.” (08:03)
    • “It can go real calm and quiet for stretches, and then a wave comes and knocks you out flat. It’s not a sign you’re not healing.” (08:32)

Moving Forward, Not 'Moving On'

• Carrying Memories Forward:
  • Distinction between ‘moving on’ (leaving someone behind) and ‘moving forward’ (carrying them with you).
    • “My mom doesn’t get smaller as my life gets bigger. She comes with me and I think about her at every significant moment like she is there, just not how I would love her to be.” (09:05)

Keeping Loved Ones Alive Through Stories

• Say Her Name:
  • Importance of talking about and remembering those we lost.
    • “As long as you’re speaking her name and sharing who she was, you are keeping something alive that does not have to die just because she did.” (09:29)
• All Emotions Coexist:
  • You don’t have to let go of old love to make room for new love.

The Wisdom from Others

• Depth of Grief Mirrors Depth of Love:
  • Quoting neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki:
    • “You couldn’t feel the depth of pain without there being the depth of that love. … The grief was just the love with nowhere to go.” (10:45)
• Legitimacy of Other Types of Grief:
  • Recognizing those who grieve mothers who are still living, due to estrangement or unmet needs.
    • “Grieving what you didn’t have is all so really so legitimate… that grief that you’ve gone through deserves the same space and the same type of compassion as any other thing we’re talking about.” (11:47)

The Concept of 'Mother Hunger' (Kelly McDaniel’s Work)

• Three Essential Elements of Maternal Love:
  • Nurturance, protection, and guidance. When any are missing, it leaves a profound—and valid—imbalance in one’s adult life.
    • “When any one of those three things—nurturance, protection, and guidance—is missing, you feel it in different ways in your life. You feel that hunger for touch, for belonging…” (12:48)
• Not a Character Flaw:
  • The lack of those elements isn’t a flaw but a gap that can be filled in other ways.
    • “That is not a character flaw. That is a gap that was created and never filled.” (15:31)

Rebuilding and Finding Maternal Energy Elsewhere

• Support is Available in Other Forms:
  • You can find nurturance, protection, and guidance in friends, mentors, therapists, and community—even if the original source was lacking.
    • “I’ve had people that have given me all three of those things in the absence of my own mother. … You don’t replace your mother. But you can build something that holds you in some of those ways.” (15:52)

Practical Guidance for Those Grieving

• Let the Wave Hit You:
  • Try not to outrun the feelings. Allow grief to wash over you and be processed, rather than suppressed.
    • “The wave is going to eventually find you. And letting it come when it comes is less exhausting than trying to outrun it.” (16:37)
• Move Your Body:
  • Physical activity helps manage the heaviness of grief.
    • “When grief sits in you, it can feel like this tight chest… Getting outside tells your nervous system something different. It doesn’t take the grief away, of course, but… it kind of loosens things a little bit.” (17:17)
• Write a Letter:
  • Expressing your feelings by writing to your mother (or the mother you wish you had) can be healing.
    • “Write to your mom, write her a letter, tell her what’s been happening, tell her what you miss, tell her what you’re proud of, tell her what you’re angry about. … That letter’s for you.” (18:05)
• Seek Out Support:
  • Find people who can simply hold space for you, such as friends or therapists.
    • “Find the people who can hold some space for it. Not people who want to fix it or hurry along, people who can sit with you in it. If you don’t have that person… maybe a good therapist, maybe somebody who works with grief could be that person.” (19:01)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Grief’s Longevity:

  • “My mom died so many years ago, and I still feel that.” (20:26)

• On Grieving 'What Could Have Been':

  • “Grieving the mother you needed and didn’t get… that grief… deserves the same space and the same type of compassion as any other thing we’re talking about. You’re not less than. That’s not less than just because your mother is still alive and maybe you don’t have that relationship.” (12:00)

• On Allowing Yourself to Feel:

  • “You don’t have to perform joy. You don’t have to explain your grief to anybody. You don’t have to be okay. And you don’t have to not be okay either. You can be whatever you need to be. Just be gentle with yourself, please.” (20:06)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:23 — Opening reflections on the realities of Mother’s Day without your mom
• 03:02 — Tamsen’s story of loss and relocating immediately before her mother’s death
• 05:01 — The evolving nature of grief after such loss
• 08:03 — The myth of staged, linear grief and the reality of “grief as ocean waves”
• 09:05 — Moving forward vs. moving on; carrying your loved one’s memory into new chapters
• 09:29 — The importance of speaking and remembering one’s loved one
• 10:45 — Wendy Suzuki’s insight on the relationship between love and grief
• 11:47 — Validity of grief from complicated or absent relationships
• 12:48 — Discussion of ‘Mother Hunger’: the three elements of maternal love
• 15:31 — These are not character flaws—they are gaps that can be filled in other ways
• 15:52 — How friendship, mentoring, and community can provide maternal energy
• 16:37 — Guidance for coping with grief “waves” on holidays
• 17:17 — The recommendation to move your body and change your physiology
• 18:05 — The healing practice of writing a letter to your mother (or to the mother you wish you had)
• 19:01 — The importance of finding safe, supportive people (or therapists) to sit with your grief

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Closing Thoughts

Tamsen closes with a message of validation, understanding, and encouragement, reminding listeners that “if you are hurting this weekend, it is because you loved deeply.” She emphasizes the importance of not grieving in isolation, feeling whatever you feel, and seeking even small moments of relief and companionship. She invites listeners to share their own stories and reach out to friends for whom Mother’s Day might be especially hard, reinforcing the community and support at the core of her show.

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For anyone who approaches Mother’s Day with a heavy heart, this episode offers empathy, practical wisdom, and a gentle permission to feel whatever you need to feel—and to know you’re not alone.

Transcript

[Tamsen]

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[Tamsen]

Hi there ladies. Welcome back to the show. So Mother's Day is this weekend and it made me think that we should talk about it for a little bit before it actually gets here. So I know that for a lot of women, Sunday is not a simple day, myself included. The world makes it look like it should be. There's brunches, there's flowers, there's cards, there's posts everywhere of women with their moms calling them their best friends. If that is not your reality, if your mom is gone, or if your relationship with her is painful or complicated or non existent, you can feel incredibly alone in the middle of all this, like everyone else got something that you didn't. So I, I really felt it was important to talk about this. And we've, we've talked a lot about moms and we've talked about grief on this show. But I just felt like with Mother's Day around the corner sometimes I don't sit with it all the time and I just try to get through it and not think about it. But I don't know, this year maybe I'm getting older. I don't know. So I lost my mom when I was 20 and there are women listening to this right now whose mother's alive but who grieve her just as much as I grieve mine, who's gone. Because maybe she was never really there, or because a relationship caused more hurt than it ever gave comfort, or. Or maybe you've had to create a distance just to take care of yourself. Whatever it is, I know grief is real and that grief counts. And there's no ceremony for it, which can make it even harder to carry. So this episode is one for all of us. I want to share what I've learned over the years about grief, about loss, about finding your way through a day when the world tells you you should be feeling one way, but you feel completely different. So pull up a chair. Maybe you're going for a walk. Whatever it is, we're going to sit together with this for a little bit again. My mom died when I was 20 years old from breast cancer. It came back very aggressively after years of her being treated. After two mastectomies, it metabolized to her liver and her lungs. And it moved fast as a family. It was my mom, my dad, my brother, my younger brother, myself. We had just relocated to Tampa, four of us, brand new city, still getting our footing. We were actually in a temporary apartment, trying to figure out where we were going to live. And within the second month of us being there, she relapsed. And before we could even understand what was happening and what was going on, she was diagnosed again. And then she was gone. And she passed away the day after Christmas. She was basically sick all that Christmas Day and by that night, incoherent, and passed away the next morning, December 26th. My brother was 16. I was. I just turned 20. And my dad and my brother and I were suddenly the three of us in a city where we barely knew anybody. Planning my mom's funeral. I spent the last 35 years doing everything without her. My first job, my first apartment, my wedding, my first one, and my second one, my divorce, which she, of course, never knew about, finding Ira, who I think she would love, who she never got to meet, writing a book, going through menopause, which, and this is something I think about a lot, she never got to warn me about, talk to me about, never got to tell me what it was like for her. I don't even know if she knew what she went through because she went through it due to cancer and chemotherapy. That intergenerational conversation that most women get to have with their moms. The ones where you realize, oh, that is what's happening, or that's what's going to happen. I never got that Like a lot of women, I went through the whole thing without her roadmap of life. And here's what I will tell you. I could not walk into a Hospital for 20 years after she died. At least, I mean, I did when I had to. But the smell alone would bring me to my knees. The grief doesn't follow a schedule or a timeline. It doesn't resolve and file itself away after a few years. I. I really have realized over time it changes shape. So when Mother's Day comes around and the world is asking me to feel something simple or just talking about it, I feel a lot of things. Gratitude for the 20 years I did have. Grief for everything that came after, and a particular kind of longing that I suspect a lot of. You know, the wish that she could have just seen a little more of who myself, my brother became who we are. I even think about it in the context of my brother, like never meeting my little nephew or my brother's wife and it's mind boggling the years that have gone by without her. I've been thinking a lot recently about what I actually know and have learned after 35 years of caring. This what's helped. What I wish somebody had told me earlier. The first thing is that grief doesn't move in this straight line and nobody should tell you it does.

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[Tamsen]

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[Tamsen]

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[Tamsen]

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[Tamsen]

I thought it was supposed to go in those stages of grief, like this, to this, to this, to this. And then you're going to be here, and then you're going to feel this, and you're going to come out the other side, and then you're going to move on. But it doesn't work like that. One day I will be in a grocery store even now, and a song will come on and it will undo things, like all these years later, and I'll think, what is going on? What is going on with me? I already. I already got through that. I already went through that. Nothing is wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with you. Grief moves more like an ocean than it does a calendar. It ebbs and flows. It can go real calm and quiet for stretches, and then a wave comes and knocks you out flat. It's not a sign you're not healing. That's just kind of how this works. And anybody that tells you it doesn't maybe hasn't been through this. The second thing, we don't just move on. I really believe we move forward. And I've watched, not just with my mom, but with my dad losing two wives in his lifetime. We move forward. Those two things sound similar, but they're actually completely different. Moving on implies leaving her behind, like, okay, chapter closed, what's next? Moving forward allows you to know you're going to carry that person with you into every new thing. So my mom doesn't get smaller as my life gets bigger. She comes with me and I think about her at every significant moment like she is there, just not how I would love her to be. The third thing, and this is one that I have leaned on, I want you to say her name, talk about her, tell the stories. As long as you're speaking her name and sharing who she was, you are keeping something alive that does not have to die just because she did. And you don't have to let go of that love in order to make room for new love, too. All those things coexist. They really do. And I feel like I've become living proof of that now. I could never have seen that or 20 or 25 or 30 like I was. I just couldn't have seen it. I actually tried to ignore that pain and cover it up with other things. And it wasn't until I really worked through it, and I worked through it with a therapist. And I've done some different things to really understand all that, not feel so angry. Grief and happiness can live in the same house. And it's interesting, Wendy Suzuki, a neuroscientist who has been on the show, said this to me, and I never forgot this. She lost her father and her brother within months of each other. I cannot even imagine. And she said that what she realized through the grief was that she couldn't feel that depth of pain when without there having been that depth of love. Think about that. You couldn't feel the depth of pain without there being the depth of that love. And she said when she finally understood that, that the grief was just the love with nowhere to go. She exhaled. And I have to tell you, when she said that, I thought about it all weekend. After she left the show, we recorded the show, and I'm like, oh, my gosh. No one's ever said that to me before. I've never even thought of something like that. So maybe you're in a lot of pain right now. Maybe you had your mom for a long time, but she passed recently, and this is your first Mother's Day without her. And my arms are around you if that's the case. But I want you to know, if you're in a lot of pain, it's because you loved a lot. That's not a wound. That is evidence of something really beautiful that you had. And for the women in complicated living relationships, while I have not been through that, what I have come to understand is that grieving what you didn't have is all also really so legitimate. Grieving the mother you needed and didn't get that version of this relationship that you see a lot of other people in that you were hoping for or still hope for, that grief that you've gone through that deserves the same space and the same type of compassion as any other thing we're talking about. You're not less than that. That's not less than just because your mother is still alive. And maybe you don't have that relationship. It's interesting. I booked Kelly McDaniel on this show who wrote a book called Mother Hunger. And I read the book, and I knew the questions I was going to ask her, but I don't think until she was right in front of me that I really, really understood the framework of all of it. And it's been really powerful. It's powerful for women who didn't get what they needed from their mothers. And, and she identified three essential elements of maternal love that I'd never thought about before. Nurturance, protection, and guidance. And I never split anything up like that. A lot of it's because my mother was sick for a very long time before she died. And maybe I just, I just didn't have any clear, you know, I didn't do any clinical work in all of this. But what she found in her clinical work is that when any one of those three things, nurturance, protection, and guidance is missing, you feel it in different ways in your life. You feel that hunger for touch, for belonging. Some people feel a constant low level of anxiety that they don't know where it comes from. Some feel like they don't have an internal compass for their own choices. Oh, gosh, I love this time of year.

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that is not a character flaw. That is a gap that was created and never filled. Here's what also stayed with me. Those three things can be found elsewhere. You're not too old or too late for that. Nurturance, warmth of somebody who sees you and says, I'm here. That could be a friend. That could be a mentor. That could be a therapist. Therapist. That could be your community of women right now. Then there's protection. That's somebody that's in your corner. That helps you kind of feel safe in the world. And then finally the third one. Guidance. Maybe it's an older woman who helps you think through your choices and allows you to trust your instincts more. That's also available, too, if you're looking for it. Maybe that comes in the form of a friend you haven't talked to in a long time. You pick up the phone and then they just kind of know you and they're there for you. And I think about that. I've had people that have given me all three of those things in the absence of my own mother. Women who have shared shown up in that role. Not people. I've predicted. A colleague who checked on me more than she had any obligation to do. That was during my divorce. I had a therapist who helped me really understand myself and put things into place. I have friends who have become family. They're with me on holidays every year. It didn't mean I replaced my mom. You don't replace your mother. But you can build something that holds you in some of those ways. And for women who have never had it to begin with, finding those things can feel like you're finally going forward So I hope that for you, I hope that you can open yourself up to, you know, finding your people, especially if you're in midlife right now. And this is hitting in a lot of different ways, because I certainly know it does. I always want to leave you with some things that are gonna help a little bit, because we never know when that wave is gonna hit us and knock us on our butt. It could be a song, a smell, you know, I don't know, something that you see, a picture. For a lot of us, it could come this weekend with Mother's Day here and everybody getting gifts and flowers and all sorts of stuff. I hope you can try not to run from it. I know the instinct, and it's what I've done all along, is to get busy, distract myself, push myself through. But the wave is going to eventually find you. And letting it come when it comes is less exhausting than trying to outrun it. Cry through it if you need to, feel it, talk to somebody about it, move through. That is actually how you do the work. Another thing I want you to do this weekend is move your body. And I know that sounds like something people say when they don't know what else to say, but there is truth in it. When grief sits in you, it can feel like. I mean, it just can feel like this tight chest, like you can't get a deep breath. You can't breathe. It's all shallow heaviness. It won't lift. You can. You can't even see any light moving. Even if it's getting up in the morning and walking before everybody else gets up. Getting outside tells your nervous system something different. It doesn't take the grief away, of course, but for me, it kind of loosens things a little bit. So I know it's okay to breathe something else. I do. I did this for a very long time afterwards. I don't know if I do it as much now, but I do it from time to time, is write to your mom, write her a letter, tell her what's been happening, tell her what you miss, tell her what you're proud of, tell her what you're angry about. If that's somewhere in you, you don't have to send it anywhere, of course. But I really believe that act of writing is a thing like, AI is not going to do that for you. Writing it in your notes on your phone is not going to do that for you. I want you to sit down and write. And for women with complicated living relationships, you can write to the mother. You need it Even if she's not the mother you have, that letter's for you. It's not for her. That is all for you. You don't have to do anything with it, but hold onto it. And then finally, I hope that even if it's not on Sunday, maybe it's Friday, maybe it's Saturday. Find the people who can hold some space for it, not people who want to fix it or hurry along, people who can sit with you in it. If you don't have that person in your life right now, maybe a good therapist, maybe somebody who works with grief could be that person. Because I don't want you to carry any of this alone. And you don't have to figure it out alone either. So remember, if you are hurting this weekend, it is because you loved deeply. That is not something you have to get through. It is something you get to honor. Give yourself permission to feel whatever you need to feel on Sunday. You don't have to perform joy. You don't have to explain your grief to anybody. You don't have to be okay. And you don't have to not be okay either. You can be whatever you need to be. Just be gentle with yourself, please. And know that we're all in this in different situations. My mom died so many years ago, and I still feel that. And some of you, this may be your first Mother's Day without her. If you have a story that you want to share about your mom, about what helps about what this day brings up, leave a comment, leave a review. I want to hear from you. And if there's a woman in your life for whom Sunday is going to be hard, and you probably know who it is, maybe if you don't know what to say, just reach out and say, I'm thinking about you. That's enough. That that's all. That's all you have to do. I hope this helped in some way. I hope you know you're not alone. I hope you know that's what this show is all about. I want to thank you so much for listening to the show, for being here with us. We put a lot into these conversations because there are a lot of hard conversations that we have to have. And I hope this helped in some small way. And I will see you next time.