My mom would have been 76 yesterday.

Not only have I lived longer than she ever got to. I'm also on the other side of surviving the same breast cancer that took her from me at 43.

Every year, there is a 24-day window in March, from the day she died on the 6th to her birthday on the 30th, where she is on my mind every single day. Not just because I miss her, but because of what we never got to finish. Our relationship was complicated. And she died before we ever had the chance to work through it together.

For a long time, I didn't realize how much the relationship was affecting me, and how I was letting that shape me. The unhealed relationship between a mother and her child does not stay in the past. The unresolved relationship follows you. Into your relationships. Into your career. Into the way you lead. Into the way you love. Into the way you decide, consciously or subconsciouly, about what you believe you deserve.

But, here's the thing nobody wants to talk about enough: when we don't heal it, when we don’t work through it, we allow it to become an excuse. Not because we're weak, but because the wound is real, and real wounds hurt. And it’s easier to use the hurt of the wound as a reason for your life than it is to actually do the work. If you're reading this and something just landed, that feeling is worth paying attention to. That's where the work begins.

I've watched it in my own life, and 've watched it in the lives of hundreds of executives and leaders I've coached over the years. Smart, capable, accomplished people, who are still running from something that happened in a house they grew up in decades ago.

The leader who won't bet on their own business idea because they watched a parent fail and saw what it did to their family. The executive who stays silent in the boardroom because as a child, speaking up wasn't safe. Or the one who dominates every room because silence was never an option growing up either.

The mother-child relationship shapes everything. It shapes who we become, how we lead, and how we see ourselves when nobody's watching. That bond, healthy or broken or somewhere painfully in between, leaves a mark.

But here's what I know now, and I had to learn it after years of doing the work; on the other side of a lot of hard work:

The wound doesn't get to write the rest of your life. That's a choice that is yours to make.

Healing isn't about them anymore. It's not about waiting for an apology that may never come, or a conversation you never got to have, or a relationship that didn't get to be what you needed it to be.

Healing is about you deciding that the story doesn't end there.

My mom and I never got to heal ours, I will always carry that, but I’ve decided it doesn’t get to drive.

Happy heavenly birthday, Mom. 💛

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STEADY is my 6-week program for humans navigating disruption, transition, and the pressure to hold it all together. It's not therapy. It's not motivation. It's the practical work of rebuilding something solid inside yourself, even when, especially when, the ground beneath you was never as stable as it should have been.

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XoXo, Angie B.