Her Opinion Was the Only One That Mattered
On ambition, approval, and giving birth at 44.
❤️ Quick content note: This essay is a bit more personal than my usual. I discuss losing my mother. If this isn’t the right time for you to engage with this material, I understand.
In the various rooms where I’d pictured getting The Call — inside the summer-camp director’s office; at my dorm-room desk; in bed at 3 a.m. — I never once thought I’d be on an airplane.
Taxiing along the tarmac in Orlando, Florida on a Tuesday afternoon, I switched my phone off airplane mode.
Immediately a call from my older sister appeared on the screen.
In my left ear: “Please stay seated until we arrive at the gate and the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign.”
In my right ear: “Hello? What’s that in the background? Are you on a Zoom call? I can call back.”
“No, I’m on a plane.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, I just wanted to let you know — mom passed away this morning.”
My mother passed away on Tuesday, March 3, six weeks shy of her 89th birthday. She’d had a stroke in early January, and my father, siblings, and I are grateful she is at peace.
She was a wife to her husband of 67 years, a mother to 7 children, and grandmother to 4.
As the baby of the family, I arrived when she was 44, which means I was in her life — and terrified of her death — for just over half of it.
Growing up with older parents meant a few things: a penchant for music from another era (any other “Chattanooga Choo Choo” fans in the house? No? Just me?); the occasional “What will your granddaughter have?” gaffe by a restaurant server; the signs and symptoms of heart attack, stroke, and other imminent ways of dying tattooed on the back of my eyelids.
I feel as though I’ve been preparing for my parents’ death my entire life, which is probably a big reason why I’m coping as well as I am now.
“What does your mother think you do for work?” is a question I love to ask communicators.
My answer always used to be: “I run newspapers for large corporations.”
Years ago, I cried as Julia Louis-Dreyfus dedicated her Golden Globe win to her father, who had passed a few days prior.
“I’m so glad he liked me,” she said, racing her tears to the end of the speech. “Because his opinion is the only one that mattered.”
I remember feeling relieved that a woman so accomplished in her life could admit that.
I also remember feeling jealous that her father so intimately knew her talent, her achievement, her impact on her community and on the world.
I conflated what Louis-Dreyfus said — her father liked her as a human — with what I desperately longed to feel: that my parents were proud of me.
That they saw my success.
I’d long understood my searing, relentless ambition as indistinguishable from the desire to please my parents — and, equally so, felt curious about what would happen to that ambition in their absence.
As I later mused to my therapist: Would I just keep chasing the approval of a ghost?
Last summer, everything I knew about myself changed inside of a 48-hour span after reading Meg Josephson’s Are You Mad at Me?.
Or, more appropriately, everything I assumed I couldn’t change about myself.
I had spent my whole life operating from a set of beliefs I’d never examined: that I needed to prove I was good because I secretly feared I was bad. That when people were in a bad mood, it was my fault. That it was unsafe for me to relax — that I was always performing, always maintaining the version of myself that people expected me to be.
Josephson put names to what had only been feelings in her exploration of the fawn response — an unconscious survival response rooted in relational complex trauma, manifesting as “being more appealing,” “being liked,” “being helpful and agreeable.”
Prior realizations I’d arrived at — about grief, anxiety, imposter syndrome — felt like software updates in comparison.
This was a whole new operating system.
“The mind wants us to have control over any emotion that feels uncomfortable to protect us from it, and so we resist and criticize ourselves as a way to feel in control.”
For the first time, I had words to describe the relationship between my ambition, my perfectionism, and my need for approval.
Understanding this relationship through the lens of a survival response — it’s literally my brain trying to keep me alive — meant it wasn’t some kind of defective Venn diagram I’d carry to the grave.
My parents would never be able to give me the approval I sought.
I have no children, but I have long felt an instinct toward my career and how I serve others within it that all words fail to describe except for “maternal.”
It’s not lost on me that I am the exact age that my mother was when I was born — and that I too, birthed something into the world at 44: my business.
I recall listening to Tracee Ellis Ross a few years ago discuss the juxtaposition of feeling “fertile with creativity, fertile with power” at midlife — as her biological fertility “drained” out of her — and thinking that’s what I want.
In my own midlife, I find poetry in nearly everything, so of course I found the timing of my mother’s passing — the day before I was due to deliver my first workshop as Ellen Griley, Founder of Equilibrious Communications — to be aching and exquisite.
The last time I ever spoke with my mother was on Christmas Eve.
I was home for a visit. I’d quit my job earlier in the month.
We were walking arm in arm toward the exit of her assisted living facility.
“How’s Cisco?” she asked.
I did some quick mental math on whether knowing I’d quit my job would make her worry about me being able to feed myself (it would) and whether it would harm anyone if I told a little white lie for now and figure out a way to tell her about my business a little later (it wouldn’t).
“It’s great, mom.”
“Good,” she cooed. “That’s good.”
Walking into the ALI Employee Experience Conference the day after my mother died, I kept the news to myself, despite having friends in the audience.
It was less that I was concerned about crying — see prior thoughts on crying — and more that the work to be done felt somehow sacred.
A dialogue between me, the memory of my mother, and the prior version of myself that existed before last summer — the one that clung tightly to my inner critic.
The audience of folks learning about trauma-informed employee communications just happened to be there.
Afterward, the only thing I felt was relief.
It was over. I’d made it.
I was safe.
My inner critic was nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile, my mother is now everywhere.
Currently
Building: My first thought leadership report ahead of Mental Health Awareness month. It will be a synthesis of a few studies through a trauma-informed lens alongside my own original research on communicating in polycrisis.
Enjoying: All of Oregon’s perfect charm, including a women’s networking event I recently attended with my new friend Audrey. The challenge: You could talk about everything but work.
Listening: This interview with Olafur Eliasson, my favorite artist, is endlessly inspiring me as a business owner, creative, and human. I’m also halfway through Maria Bryan’s podcast interview with Michael Kass on ethical storytelling for nonprofits. Lastly, I love If Books Can Kill and was delighted by Michael and Peter’s discussion of employee communications in their episode on Bullshit Jobs.
Reading: Finished The Business of Expertise. Now on to The Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors. Also reading People-First Internal Communication. Temporarily shelved Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers while I research for a project I’m working on. Also wrapped up My Murder. Will likely start Annie Bot on the flight to my mom’s memorial service.
Watching: Caught a screening of Lost in Translation at the Portland Art Museum. Nobody films a party like Sofia. Also caught the Hockney exhibit while there. So pleasant.
Wondering: If companies are thinking about conscientious objector polices for AI.
If you like what you read here, please subscribe and share it with someone who should read this, too. And if you want to work with me, you can find me at Equilibrious Communications.
Powerful and resonant.
Beautiful, and deeply relatable. Thank you for sharing.