The other day I picked up the phone to call my mum, like thousands of times before, but my feeling was different. I wanted to call her.

In the past I mostly called her because she was pressing me to do so, tapping into my sense of guilty.

“You never call”, “when we call you are distant”, “you do not care about me”, “I could be dead for what you know”. Over and over.

The natural reaction was to call so she could not say I did not. So she could stop the guilt trip. She never had enough.

So, when I found myself wanting to call her, I also found myself quite surprised about it.

It took me a while to realise why my feelings changed so drastically. It is all because of a phrase my mum told me last time we met face to face, a phrase that she never said out loud but I needed to hear. I did not realise how much I was needing these words until I heard them.

“You cannot do anything about my situation, only I can act about it.”

My mum is unhappy, she has been unhappy for a long time. She feels lonely, abandoned, left out. She does not seem to manage to get out of a pit in which she fell years ago. And she unconsciously put a lot of her neediness and loneliness on me, making me feel like I was responsible for her happiness. Like I needed to take care of her, like a mum, as I explained here.

I grew up with a sense of guilt that controlled all my actions. So, that day, face to face, I told her that I am sorry that she constantly felt sad, I just do not know what to do to fix it. And she told me those words, for the first time in my life.

I felt released. It was as if she told me: “You are not responsible for my happiness. Your are free”.

Being released from such a burden made me think clearer and made space for something that was not there in the relationship between me and my mum before: what I desire.

And, just like that, a space opened, desire came in, and I picked up the phone and I called her.

It might seem like a small step, but to me, this was the biggest step towards me that my mum has ever taken.