The Hardest Flex

My husband used to tell me something I did not want to hear.

Every time I spoke to my mother — every time I was around her, every time her name came up in a conversation that required me to respond to her in any way —

my voice changed.

It reverted. Became smaller. Became younger. Became the voice of a child trying to get something right in front of someone who kept moving the standard.

He would say it gently. Your voice just changed. You just became a child again.

And I would say: No I didn't.

He would say: Yes. You did. Every time you are around her, she has control of you. You defer to her. You do what she wants. You become someone different than the woman I know — the pastor, the teacher, the woman who stands behind pulpits and leads and builds and fills rooms. Around her, you become her child. Still trying to earn something she has never been able to give you.

I did not want to hear that.

Because hearing it meant admitting something I had spent a lifetime not wanting to admit:

Not a diagnosis I applied lightly. Not a label I reached for to explain away a complicated relationship. A reality I arrived at slowly, painfully, across decades of trying to understand why I could never quite get it right with her.

Why the approval never fully came. Why the warmth was conditional. Why I could stand in a room full of people who loved me, respected me, honored me — and still feel the specific ache of needing the one person who seemed constitutionally incapable of giving me what I needed.

It took years to understand it. It took longer to accept it.

And the freedom — the actual, lived, felt freedom from the need for her approval — did not come from a breakthrough conversation. Did not come from a healing moment where she finally saw me and said the thing I needed to hear.

And I want to tell you everything I learned in the years between the child's voice on the phone and the woman who finally stopped needing the call to go a certain way.

Most people understand that needing approval is uncomfortable. Fewer people understand what it actually costs over time.

I do not know when your enough moment arrives.

Mine came in stages.

First there was the understanding — the slow, painful, reluctant recognition of what I was dealing with. That took years.

Then there was the acceptance — the moment I stopped arguing with reality and acknowledged what was true. That took longer.

Then there was the decision — the internal shift from I need her to finally see me to I release the need to be seen by her.

That shift — that decision — did not arrive in one dramatic moment. It arrived quietly. Gradually. And it was helped significantly by the practical reality that when she moved to assisted living, our daily proximity ended.

I want to be honest about that because I think it matters.

The freedom did not come from a spiritual breakthrough I can package and give you as a three-step process. It came partly from distance. From circumstances changing in a way that gave me enough space to hear my own voice again.

That decision — made at sixty-something years old, long after most people imagine they would have made it — changed everything.

Matthew 3:17.

Before Jesus performed a single miracle. Before the Sermon on the Mount. Before He fed five thousand people or raised anyone from the dead or did any of the things that would make Him recognizable to the watching world —

His Father spoke.

Identity before performance. Approval before achievement. The declaration of worth before a single thing was done to earn it.

That is the model. And it is the answer to everything we have been discussing in this guide.

The original is this: You are beloved. Before the performance. Before the achievement. Before you got it right or said the right thing or became the version of yourself you thought they needed. Before any of it. Beloved. In whom He is well pleased.

No audition required. No standard to meet. No voice adjustment necessary. Just: beloved.

Pastor Nicole Washington is a pastor, teacher, author, speaker, and patient advocate whose family roots run six generations deep in the soil of Georgia and Alabama.

She is the founder of Nicole Washington Ministries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and the author of fifteen books across three collections.

Currently navigating end-stage renal disease and hemodialysis three times a week, she ministers from the dialysis chair — building free resources, hosting the Still Here Support Group every Tuesday on Zoom at 7 PM EST, and leading IMPACT Black Kidney Health nationally.