Open Hands
When Mothering Shifts from Doing to Trusting
My son called me from a ski mountain this past weekend. He and his dad were on a father-son trip, demoing new skis and carving through Canadian snow. We talked about holding edges and technique, and at one point he joked about his father: “Dad’s cheating—not carving his turns.”
I laughed and gently reminded him about his dad’s decades-old ankle injury. But inside, something bloomed. Because here was my thirty-something son, skiing with grace and precision—and knowing the difference between carving a turn and cheating one. I never sat him down and taught him that. He learned by following my serpentine turns down the mountain, pulling out his own style with practice—the same way my father taught me. Three generations of a lesson no one ever spoke out loud.
He never said, “Thanks for teaching me to ski, Mom.” He didn’t need to. The skiing said it for him. A metaphor of sorts: this is what it looks like when you’ve done your job.
Nobody prepares you for this part of motherhood—the part where your hands are supposed to be open.
When they’re little, your hands are full. Tying shoes, wiping noses, gripping handlebars on first bike rides. When they’re teenagers, your hands are busy—signing permission slips, typing emails to teachers, holding your tongue (which often requires both hands). But when they’re all grown and in their thirties? Your hands are supposed to be open. Palms up. Holding nothing but trust.
• • •
It is the hardest posture I have ever held. Because the love doesn’t get smaller when they leave. It gets enormous. And when you can no longer channel it into doing—into packing lunches and helping with college essays—it has nowhere to go. So it becomes worry.
Middle-of-the-night mental loops. An almost obsessive attention to their outcomes, their timelines, their choices. Are they happy? Are they settled? Are they with the right person? Why can’t I stop thinking about this?
So let me Name it, because that’s what we do here.
The feeling is a mother’s enormous love bumping up against the edges of what she CAN control. That’s it. It’s not anxiety in the clinical sense, though it can masquerade as that. It’s not a failure of faith. It’s the natural, almost biological consequence of pouring yourself into humans for decades and then being asked to quietly witness—all the while staying in your lane.
If you’re someone who has built a life around being capable—the one who can fix it, teach it, shape it, coach it—the open-hands posture feels almost physically wrong. Your fingers want to close around something. Your brain wants a project. Your heart wants a guarantee.
But this season doesn’t need your hands. It needs your trust.
• • •
Here’s what I’m learning to Claim in this season: more is caught than taught.
I spent my first two decades in education, teaching children to decode text, to make meaning from marks on a page. And the thing I know for certain is this: the lessons that stick aren’t the ones you plan. They’re the ones that get absorbed—through watching, through proximity, through the way you carry yourself when you don’t think anyone’s paying attention.
My son carving beautiful turns on a mountain? Caught, not taught. My daughter’s entrepreneurial courage to open her own business? Caught, not taught. The values, the discernment, the way they move through the world—I didn’t hand them a manual. They were watching. Always watching. Witnessing my mistakes, too.
My job now is to keep being worth watching. Not because they need my instruction, but because integrity is a practice, not a performance. And the way I hold this season—with open hands or clenched fists—is itself a lesson they’re catching.
• • •
The Reframe came from something I wrote a while back—an effort to self-regulate my angsty mind:
“Maybe the worry isn’t a sign that something’s wrong.
Maybe it’s just what love feels like when you can’t control the outcome.”
The worry isn’t a warning. It’s love in an unfamiliar shape. It’s what happens when the verb of mothering shifts from do to trust. And trust, unlike doing, gives you nothing to hold onto. No checklist. No schedule. No evidence that you’re getting it right.
Just open hands. And the faith that what you planted is already growing—on mountains, in the careers they’re building, and in the love stories you weren’t invited to direct.
• • •
If you’re in this season—the one where your children don’t need you the way they used to, but your love for them hasn’t gotten the memo—I want you to know: you’re not doing it wrong. The antsy feeling, the 2 a.m. rehearsals of conversations you’ll never have? That’s not dysfunction. That’s devotion bumping up against its own limits.
Be the mother they want to call from the mountain. Be the home they want to bring someone special to. Be the woman who held her hands open and trusted the divine timeline—even when every cell in her body wanted to grab the steering wheel.
The legacy isn’t waiting on anyone’s life decision to be confirmed. It’s already out there—carving turns, choosing well, living with grace.
To every mother out there gripping when she knows she should be releasing: I see you. Open your hands, mama bear. And trust what you built.
With love and open palms,
✨Andrea
Chief Reframing Officer @ Beyond the Reframe
