Sermons by Father Alfonse at Mary Immaculate
Breaking Mom's Heart: How Not to Ruin Your Relationship
Description
There is a mother in your life right now who is waiting for you to call. Or there was. And you didn't. And now the calling is no longer possible, and the grief sits in the seat next to you when you drive past her old house. Or she is still here, and the relationship is complicated, and you have spent years quietly asking her — without ever saying it out loud — to please stay out of your life. To stop asking how you're doing. To stop noticing when something is wrong. To stop loving you quite so much, because her love is inconvenient and your life is full and you do not have time for it right now. This episode is for you. Father Alfonse Navarro delivered this talk on a Mother's Day morning to a room full of people who were not ready for it. He opens with a child's letter — a girl named Claire who handed him a note minutes before he walked to the front of the room and told him, with the confidence only children have, to read it aloud. He does. And then he turns the entire room around. What follows is not the Mother's Day talk you have heard before. There is no greeting card sentiment. There is no praise of mothers in the abstract. Instead, there is a confession — about the years he refused to kiss his own mother goodbye, the embarrassment of being a teenager whose mother rolled down the car window in front of his friends and waited until he came back, and the slow recognition, decades later, that the thing he resented as a boy was the only commandment of love he could never repay. The episode moves through a series of recognitions that anyone navigating parental relationships, anticipatory grief, or unresolved family wounds will feel in their chest: — The reframe that the impossible thing we ask of our mothers is not the driving, the cooking, the funding, the showing up. The impossible thing is asking her to stay out of our lives entirely. To stop being interested. — The mortality turn at the heart of the talk: she will get old. She will get sick. She will be hurt by things you say without thinking. She is a human being with a finite nervous system and a finite number of years. Sit by her side while you still can. — The paradox of mothering: the children who feel safe enough to push back, to demand things, to tell you exactly how they feel, are the ones who were loved well. Compliance is not the metric. Trust is. — The closing observation, drawn from the prophet Isaiah, that the only time the sacred is described in scripture as a mother is in the context of unconditional love. The closest human analog we have for what we mean when we say love is unconditional — the love that does not leave, does not forget, does not give up — is the love a mother carries for her child. This is offered as observation, not doctrine. You can sit with it however you need to. What this episode is good for: — Listeners working through anxiety about a parent's aging or decline — Anyone holding complicated grief over a mother who has died, especially if the relationship was unfinished — Adult children navigating burnout, life transitions, and the quiet estrangement that happens when work and distance and self-protection take over — Anyone in a season of meaning-seeking who is looking for spiritual authenticity without institutional pressure — People processing the question of what they owe the people who raised them, and what gets lost when that question goes unanswered Father Alfonse is a Catholic priest in Texas whose talks have been listened to by millions of people. He's telling you: write the letter you have been putting off. There is still time. Until there isn't.
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