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Feelings Fitness Podcast

Raising a family can be emotionally overwhelming. Managing the logistics of a household can be such a grind. Life in general can be extremely exhausting. Can you relate? Many families feel overwhelmed by the fast pace of family life. Enter yoga and mindfulness. Let The Feelings Fitness Podcast be your guide to understanding what yoga and mindfulness is and how it can help your family. Allow Feelings Fitness to show you how simple yoga sequences, yogic philosophy, and mindfulness practices can help on the home front. By using The Feelings Fitness hacks you can create a peace living space and a calm mindset for your family. Each week we will dive into how to make your home life more functional. You will learn how to use these yoga and mindfulness practices to guide you through the seasons of life. After listening to each episode, you will walk away with yoga and mindfulness tools and lots of inspiration. You will be all set to move through the fast pace of family life with intention and ease.Your host, Suzanne Bazarko, is a registered yoga teacher, licensed professional counselor, certified mindfulness practitioner, and mom of two. She created Feelings Fitness as a vehicle to share with you what she has learned from raising her own family and how yoga and mindfulness has helped along the way.

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Feelings Fitness Podcast

The Silent Storm: What Happens When a Mom Loses Her Mom

May 26, 2025 • Suzanne Bazarko

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Speaker 0: 0:00

Welcome back to the Feelings Fitness Podcast, where we explore the deep, the real and the often unspoken parts of family life, parenting and, mostly, motherhood. I'm your host, Suzanne, and today's episode is personal. It's tender. It's for the mom who has lost her mom. It's a deeper dive into this Growing Through Grief series. We've talked about Mother's Day. We've talked about the existential crisis that happens when you're dealing with a day like Mother's Day after you've lost your mom. So today we're discussing this idea of a mom who has lost her mom and what that feels like. So if that's you, I want to say this up front I see you, You're carrying something incredibly heavy and you're not alone. Today we're talking about what it means when a mom loses her mom and why it's such a tough lot in life. It's a loss that hits differently. Let's unpack the why. Becoming a mother is a full-hearted, full-body transformation, but when you're doing that while grieving your own mom, that's a storm few talk about. You're expected to be present, caring, steady, while feeling like a piece of your own foundation is missing. You're both the daughter in grief and the mother holding it all together. There are days when you just want to be held, to be nurtured, but you're the one doing the nurturing. It's exhausting and often invisible. When your mom dies, you don't just lose her, you lose the bridge between generations, the person who remembers your first steps, who knows your story without you ever needing to explain it. As you raise your own children, the link becomes even more valuable. You want to call her for advice, for comfort or just to share a funny thing. Your kid said, but the line's gone, Quiet. The silence can be deafening, and I'll share a personal story on that note, and I mean I literally had myself in tears just now thinking about it. It was a moment a couple months after my mom had passed away. My mom passed away in April of 2022. And I think it was like June 2022.

Speaker 0: 2:15

I was sitting out on the driveway with my daughter, we were doing sidewalk chalk and all the things. We had our backs to each other, so I couldn't really like hear exactly what she was saying. But when I realized what she was saying, she said where is Graham Graham's cell phone? And I'm thinking to myself what the heck is she talking about? I'm like, well, Poppy has it. And she said well, can we call it? And I literally lost it, because it was just this moment where I really really realized it really sunk in in such a sad and profound way. Then you know, yeah, like the cell phone still exists, the line hasn't been cut off yet, but nobody's going to answer on the other end. And then that prompted us to actually go in and I still have a recording of it, because I was like I knew that at some point that line was going to be cut off and so we wanted to hear her voicemail for one last time.

Speaker 0: 3:15

And it was this like super sad moment. But at the same time it was a little bit of closure, where we said you know what we're going to do this thing it's going to be hard, and then we're going to try to come to terms with it. So, yeah, when that line goes silent, it's stifling. It's an experience. It requires some work to get through. Let's just put it that way. Here's the hardest truth, though Moms need mothering too. So that was kind of my daughter actually mothering me a little bit. It was super interesting. She was really kind of wise beyond her years in even thinking about that, to suggest that and then being willing to go through that process.

Speaker 0: 3:59

But when the person who filled that role, that mothering role, is gone. You feel it in the small moments when you're sick, when you're overwhelmed, when you're lonely and no one is checking in on you the way that she did. Of course there are other people I have plenty of people who I value dearly that checked in on me, but it's always a little bit different than the way that your mom checked in on you. So it becomes kind of a loss of this emotional safety of being someone's child, even as a parent. It is profound. So it's not just your loss too, so it's your kids loss as well. And, like I said, although there were people supporting me, there are certainly other people supporting my kids as well. But it's just that one particular person that you can't replace and everybody has a unique relationship with one another, and so when one of those unique relationships is gone, it's just a void that no one can fill, unfortunately, no matter how great all the other people are around. It's just it's impossible to replace that one particular person.

Speaker 0: 5:11

So it's tough to be this mom while grieving the loss of your own mom, trying to parent and grieve alongside your kids, who are grieving as well. And then there's also this shake in your sense of self. Who are you without her? And I spoke about that last week in the existential crisis of sorts. Even if your relationship with your mom was complicated, her presence anchored something in you and when she's gone it can feel like drifting, like trying to mother without a blueprint. You may wonder am I doing this right? Would she be proud of me? And some days the answer feels really, really far away. So if you've lost your mom and you're mothering without her, you're carrying a sacred, heavy kind of grief and I want to honor that.

Speaker 0: 6:00

Grief doesn't follow a clean timeline. Some days it pulses quietly, others it roars. And in motherhood it shows up in unexpected places Bedtime stories, birthday parties, hospital visits, holiday dinners. Let yourself feel it. Talk to her cry when you need to laugh at her old jokes, tell her stories to your kids. Her love is still here in you, in the way you show up, in the way you mother. So thank you so much for sharing the space with me today. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can check in on Facebook or Instagram. It's still at Feelings Fitness. I'm working towards transitioning over. Still at Feelings Fitness. I'm working towards transitioning over into at Feelings Fitness family. I just want to further clarify what this space is all about and who might benefit from being a part of this community. So I'd love to hear from you, and I'm still Suzanne S-U-Z-A-N-N-E at feelingsfitnesscom. If you want to reach out in that way, I would love to hear from you there as well. Until next time, just be gentle with yourself.