A mother/son bond is hard to beat. It’s so different from the mother/daughter bond. From the outside, you would say “they seem so close” and we are, but like most real relationships, the truth is layered. There is a deep love yet there have also been wounds, tension, and a kind of emotional stickiness that’s hard to name. A bond that sometimes feels too tight, a connection that at times has felt like trying to breathe through a wool dryer ball.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
He was just a little boy when everything started shifting. Divorce entered our world and cracked it open in ways neither of us could have truly prepared for. I had never imagined life would take that turn so early in his childhood, but I was still young myself and still learning how to hold me together. His father wasn’t absent in the way some are he tried to be present even when he was hurting and confused. Eventually, work took him out of the province, and even though he didn’t walk away in the traditional sense, the absence settled with our son. This boy was always sensitive and deeply intuitive; he felt it all. He didn’t carry that weight quietly—he expressed it through restlessness, humour, and testing limits. As he got older, those behaviors turned into harder choices and riskier paths. He was trying to make sense of a world that had shifted under his feet. He needed somewhere solid to land, and I tried to be that. I wanted to be everything—safe, strong, steady—but the truth is, I wasn’t always those things. I was still becoming the person I needed to be for myself.
Over the years, we grew codependent in subtle ways. I saw his pain and tried to soften it and as he grew from a young boy and beyond, he saw mine and tried to rescue me. We each took on roles we didn’t know how to name—me as protector, him as peacekeeper. We weren’t just mother and son; at times, we were each other’s emotional lifeline.
Eventually as I found a new relationship, and he became a stepson and stepbrother, our relationship changed. We still had lots of time for each other, but we also enjoyed being a part of a family. Like anything though, you get caught up in the chaos of it all and you lose sight of that initial relationship. We had the kind of bond where we just got each other. We still had our years of inside jokes and often took time at the end of each day to talk or quietly watch a show together. This was a daily occurrence until the teen years and then he softly pushed away. Closeness like ours can blur boundaries, and over time, we both had to learn where I end, and he began.
I’ve made mistakes. There are times I leaned too heavily on him, especially when my own world felt unsteady. There were times he’s shut me out, maybe to protect his own heart or maybe to claim some space he wasn’t always given growing up. Sometimes we would speak, and it felt like healing and other times it felt like we were talking through glass.
One thing remained constant through it all; we kept showing up.
We’ve grown together and apart and together again. We’ve had to unlearn patterns and find new language for our love. I’ve had to let go of control; he’s had to let go of guilt. In the middle of all of it, there is still this undeniable bond; a thread that holds even when it stretches thin.
If you’re reading this and you’ve had a complicated closeness with your child, a parent or sibling. I hope you know this: your story isn’t broken. It’s real. Real relationships don’t always look tidy. In some situations, they look like trying again for space in each others life and hard conversations. On the other hand, they may not look that way, that is where your boundaries come in handy. Healthy relationships should not cost you your sanity. At the end of the day, we’ve been both close and complicated, we are still learning. I have never stopped being his mom and he has never stopped being a piece of my heart.
The Other Side of Nice 