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“I was constantly seeking a balance between mourning what’s already been lost, making space for the time and moments we still had left, and making sense of this complicated process that felt like my heart was split between two contrasting realities: hope and heartbreak.” ~Liz Newman
There is a quiet heaviness that begins to settle into many of us in midlife.
It doesn’t announce itself with drama. It slips in through unanswered emails from an aging parent, through half-slept nights spent wondering how we will ever afford live-in care, or whether that one fall they had was the beginning of the end.
It’s not grief exactly. It’s the shadow of grief that lingers before the loss, that creeps in through ordinary moments and whispers that everything is slowly, quietly, but undeniably changing.
My mother has Parkinson’s. She lives alone in the UK while I live abroad—untethered by design, a traveling healer by choice—except now that freedom feels like it comes at a cost I never calculated.
She has started falling. Backwards. Her voice is nearly gone. I can barely understand her over the phone anymore, and every time she forgets a detail or struggles to find a word, my stomach knots.
I wonder when the dementia will get worse and instead of only forgetting my birthday, she will also forget about me: her eldest daughter. I wonder how long she can live on her own. I wonder what happens when things really go south.
And I panic.
The truth is, I can’t just pack up and move to the UK. Not anymore. Not with Brexit and visa restrictions. These days, my visits are brief, limited to a few weeks or months at a time. Right now, I’m here for the summer, doing what I can while I can.
Add to that the financial uncertainty of running a healing business and the lack of steady income to support full-time care. The weight of it all settles quietly. Like many of us, I carry it in silence and swallow the worry. I fold it into my body, into the slope of my shoulders. The right one, to be exact.
Until one morning I wake up, and I can’t move my right arm the way I used to. Turning it inward sends a sharp pain up through my upper arm. At first, I think I must have slept weirdly. But when the pain lingers for days, my hypochondriac side takes over. I start googling symptoms. And frozen shoulder pops up.
I pause. Then I type in “spiritual meaning of frozen shoulder.”
And everything clicks.
In spiritual traditions, the shoulder is where we carry burdens that were never ours. It’s where we hold onto responsibility, overcare, and all the invisible weight of things unsaid.
When a shoulder freezes, it may be our body’s way of saying, “I can’t carry this anymore.”
A frozen shoulder can also signify:
- Suppressed grief or emotion, often near the heart
- Over-responsibility and carrying others’ pain
- Fear of moving forward, or feeling stuck
- A lack of energetic boundaries
- A subconscious attempt to halt motion when our lives demand change
All of these mirror how I feel about my mother. The anticipatory grief. The helplessness. The guilt. The stuckness of being in-between countries, in-between decisions, and in-between who I was and who I need to become. Wanting to take care of her and to sign the power of attorney papers and equally not wanting to do any of it because it’s just so damn painful.
The Midlife Guilt That Has No Language
There is no manual for this phase of life. For the moment when your mother still lives but is slipping. When you are still someone’s child but also now the one silently parenting the parent. When love no longer feels light but edged with dread and uncertainty.
And unlike childhood, this stage has no defined rite of passage. We often endure it quietly, bravely, invisibly. We plan around it. We work through it. We cry into our pillows about it.
We don’t want to be seen as selfish. We don’t want to fail them. We don’t want to map a life of meaning only to feel like we missed the most important chapter back home. And then the body begins to speak.
Reclaiming the Self While Loving the Mother
Healing my shoulder may take time. Physically and emotionally. But it has also been an invitation to ask: Where am I over-caring? Where am I still trying to prove my worth through sacrifice? What if I let myself hold love and limits?
Maybe I don’t need to force myself to stay for an entire summer out of guilt that I otherwise don’t live nearby.
I don’t yet have all the answers about my mother’s care. But I know this:
- I don’t need to disappear to honor her: I don’t need to dim my joy in front of her so she doesn’t feel the contrast of what she’s lost.
- I don’t need to break to be a good daughter: I don’t need to say yes to every request out of fear that one day, she won’t be able to ask, nor do I need to say “I’m fine” when I’m anything but.
- I don’t need to put my dreams on hold to make up for the years I wasn’t there, or carry the weight of what I couldn’t prevent.
Maybe the most radical thing we can do, in a world where many of us live oceans away from aging parents, is to stop blending ourselves into the expectations of those who stayed behind. Our parents. Our siblings. The ancestral and societal chorus of “You owe them everything.”
Because the truth is we can’t always return. Not like generations before. The village is gone, the visa expired, the life we’ve built stretches across time zones and cultures.
Maybe we need to learn to soften the guilt without hardening our hearts. I wonder if we can learn how to grieve the distance without erasing ourselves. Can we find a new kind of middle path where love is not measured by geography but by presence, honesty, and the quiet ways we still show up?
What if love is no longer a burden carved from duty but a bond held with tenderness and boundaries?
If your shoulder aches too, or your chest feels heavy or your body is acting up in any way, pause. Because we were never meant to disappear into devotion and carry too much. We were meant to love with presence. To grieve with grace. And to remain visible, even while honoring those we come from.
I have come up with a few journaling prompts I will journal through myself. If they are in any way helpful on your own journey, please feel free to do the same:
Journaling Prompts for the Tender Weight We Carry
1. Where in my body am I holding what feels too heavy to say aloud? What does this part of me wish I would finally hear or honor?
2. What roles or responsibilities have I inherited culturally, ancestrally, or emotionally that no longer feel sustainable? Am I willing to release or reimagine them?
3. When I think of caring for my aging parent, what emotions arise beneath the surface and beyond obligation? What fears, guilt, or grief live there?
4. What does love look like without self-sacrifice? Can I write a version of devotion that includes my wholeness?
5. If my body were writing me a letter right now about how I’ve been living, what would it say? What boundaries or changes might it ask me to consider?
If you do, share in the comments what realizations came up for you.
