The Most Complicated Relationship I Have
- Patria Rector
- Aug 8
- 4 min read
Patria Rector — Founder, The Broken & Beautiful
Some things are simple. Relationships are not.
Hearts are broken. Mean, cruel, and vengeful things are done, and somehow we can still find ourselves attached to the very people who have hurt us. People are made up of so many parts, so many ways of being themselves. May none of us be judged solely by our worst day.
Forgiveness is such a complicated word. I don’t see it as either this or that anymore. Rather, I think of forgiveness as a pathway that can help move us out of trauma and toward something freer. And forgiveness comes in many packages.
Sometimes, after a small bump in the relational road, forgiveness is simply moving forward. Other times, it means allowing the death of something: the way we idealized someone, perhaps, or the belief that they possessed an answer we desperately needed. Eventually, we are faced again with the same reality: no one has every answer.
My Little Mama
My little mama, who is in a nursing home with dementia, asked me last week what I do for a living.
She knows me, but she doesn’t always know the details anymore.
I told her, “I listen to people.”
She asked me what I listen for.
“I listen for their wisdom,” I told her, “and reflect it back to them.”
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot.
Maybe forgiveness sometimes means learning to do the same thing for ourselves. Maybe it means allowing myself my own humanity in all its splendor—and its lack thereof—and listening for the wisdom that has been there all along.
A Discovery. An Invitation.
Over the past five and a half years, I’ve learned so much that I want to share with you, with the world. If I had to offer a summary statement today, I think it might be this:
Be grateful for your good body.
It is such a beautiful treasure, worthy of the gentlest mercies.
I have spent so much of my life—far too much of it—trying to control my body in order to belong. I have starved it, criticized it, belittled it, and demanded that it become something different so that I might feel safer inside the world.
In March of 2021, my body said no more.
I’ve been learning to listen ever since—to its wisdom, its boundaries, and its solid, steady, sure no.
My life today requires an enormous amount of cooperation with my body. In order to keep it functioning, I spend about three hours every morning emptying my intestines. If I don’t, I risk another blockage and another surgery.
There are days when I feel terrified that I won’t be able to keep up this daily rhythm for the rest of my life. I wonder what happens when I am older or weaker, or simply too tired of doing what has to be done.
But when I really stop and let gratitude wash over me, I realize something else is also true: today, I can.
It’s not easy. It’s not fun. It’s embarrassing. It’s nuts. But the relationship with my own body has been the most complicated relationship I have, times a million, and I’m becoming so proud of it.
The newest dimples on my legs are kind of darling, if I’m honest. The softness of my belly is comforting. There is so much good here.
This body lets me keep being a mama to my favorite people in the world. It lets me love more deeply. It lets me express and experience so much more gratitude for the smallest moments—the ones no one else in the world cares about but me.
To My Body
And I find myself wanting to say something directly to her now, to this body that has carried me all these years:
I am so sorry for the ways I starved you and hated you and belittled you. I can’t promise I will never mock you again, because sometimes it really is in good fun, and I want to keep that part of us. But not the cruel kind. I don’t want to speak to you with cruelty anymore.
I don’t want to take your creativity, resilience, or good humor for granted.
You have worked incredibly hard to keep me here.
And while I’m at it, thank you to my little mama, although she may no longer be able to fully receive this gratitude in this life.
I am grateful for her soft belly and her dimpled thighs. I am grateful for her resilience and her reasons for living. I am grateful for the body that carried her through a life that has not always been gentle with her.
She made me a survivor, too.
And it is on her shoulders that I will stand and continue to live.
The Life Still Here
There is something about seeing her body now, in this season of her life, that makes me want to be kinder to my own.
Maybe part of coming home to ourselves is learning to bless what we once believed needed to be corrected. Maybe forgiveness can reach all the way into the flesh—the body forgiving us for what we have asked of it, and us finally forgiving the body for being human.
I don’t know exactly what the years ahead will ask of mine. I know more now than I once did about how quickly a body can change a life. I also know how astonishingly hard a body will work to keep living.
So I want to meet mine there.
Some days I’ll thrive. Some days I’ll just get through. Some days I will probably complain about the whole ridiculous thing.
But today, I am so, so grateful.
For my mother’s body. For my body. For all they have survived.
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