Beginning again. Again.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you!” my mom texted earlier this week, about Becoming Jackson Whole’s 21-Day (Un-) Challenge. “I’ve been loving the practices! I play them at night to relax before bed.” 

“Great!” I tapped back, hurried or harried by my midlife workaday or shuttling of a teenager, or whatever I was doing at the moment.  

At first, I shrugged off my mom’s enthusiasm (those exclamation points!). I write and curate mindfulness practice for a living, so she does what she’s always done, since she was the loudest parent on the school bleachers. She champions my work and lets me know how proud she is. 

And yes, my mom has the luxury of time to fish each day’s 21-Day Challenge email from her inbox: she’s comfortably retired. Her status updates typically involve her Winnebago RV, which she visits lovingly like clockwork, where it sits (tarped) through the Midwestern winter in her twin home’s shared driveway.  

But then again, my mom has every reason to covet the resilience mindfulness practice can bring. In her years, she’s lost both a child (my infant sister) and my dad, the love of her life (just as they’d settled into their dream home). She’s in her second decade as caretaker of both her parents, now in their 90s, and she’s spent what feels like a lifetime unknotting her own health issues born (likely) of trauma and perpetuated by stress.  

On this path she never expected to travel, my mom has had to relearn how to live. She’s had to take (several) deep breaths.  

Then there’s my haphazard pursuit of wellness, having stumbled unpreparedly through Cesarean birth, marital abuses and blistering divorce, the mothering of a neurodivergent kid, and career upheaval.  

Always grasping at bootstraps, I’ve trained to teach Pilates and dance; studied youth mental health, narrative medicine, and end-of-life doula care; completed the Duolingo app for Spanish (twice); and failed to commit to a yoga practice more times than my instructor friends can count.  

I often listen to guided mindfulness practices last-thing, near midnight, while lying on my acupressure mat, a sadistic-looking therapeutic surface bearing thousands of plastic spikes. My household calls it the “bed of nails.”  

When I happen upon my mom’s text again several hours later (probably on said bed of nails), I do manage to pause. It doesn’t really matter how or why we each arrive at whatever form our practice takes. We’re doing it—apart but together, in the knowledge that we’re each trying. 

I revise my response, probably pinging her phone on her bedside table far later than she would have preferred.  

“I know,” I wrote. “Me, too.”