Coming Back Different: My August Availability Is Open
I've been back from the Philippines for a week and four days now, and I'm still letting it settle. My grandmother passed away on July 8th, and my mom told me she needed me there.
It was twenty-eight years since I last visited my motherland, and this time felt like the soft reckoning of truth I didn’t know I was ready to face.
Of the ten days my parents and I were there, four or five days straight, I gave myself a private ritual on the balcony of the Airbnb we were staying in — breath, movement, prayer, processing. If I hadn’t done as much work as I have, I would’ve psyched myself out of it. I’m doing too much, what will my family think of me, or how does this look? This time, with a few puffs of my cannabis pen, I just closed the drapes and did it anyway – just me, the mountains, the sunrise, and the sounds of animals and people waking up around me.
I found myself moved to tears in those moments. This is what my grandmother and her ancestors, whether they knew it or not, have worked so hard for — my sovereignty — in my body, in my mind, and in my spirit. That realization and my choice to resist narratives that keep me playing small, wielding that privilege with beauty, strength, gratitude, and joy! What a life I get to live, I thought. “Thank you. I love you. Please forgive me,” was my mantra after each ritual.
A photo of Pacencia Meneses Bonifacio as a young woman.
I spent real time with my mom, giving her bodywork with no choice to say no. And she surrendered to receive, to rest, to let go, finally. If only for a couple of hours before her mom brain would turn back on. And I sensed it caused a shift between her and me. She would show more physical affection in small moments — a soft hand on my cheek, a finger comb through my hair in a warm caress.
I also learned more of my family's real story — even some parts that usually stay hidden. My mom's grief over never learning Tagalog fluently to speak more with her mom. The favoritism, the control wounds, the ways love was withheld, and the difference in treatment between my mom, the youngest girl, and my auntie, the eldest girl among the siblings.
It validated where I’ve seen my mom's defensiveness come from, and where mine inevitably does too. I saw even more clearly how much shame I carry around being too much, too sexy, too naive, too loud, too seen, too proud of what I'm good at — and how I know that shame isn't mine at all. I got to hand some of it back.
I found myself playing a familiar role — peacekeeper between my parents. Watching my dad's tone go sharp out of nowhere, my mom's brows furrow in response, and how much smoother these interactions could go if they were met a little differently. Recognizing a similar pattern within my own relationship, quietly laughing to myself at how silly it really is.
Losing the matriarch of my maternal lineage has also sharpened a question I can't unsee: how much of the mother wound in all women comes down to never learning how to truly rest — to let go, to stop worrying, to trust something enough to release the grip?
Seeing the pattern of heart and cardiovascular diseases running through both sides of my family, it stops feeling too abstract to think about as I edge closer to thirty-three this year. As I prepare for motherhood myself, I keep asking: How can I continue to stay as committed to tending to my heart as I am to the ones I love, the future children I am responsible for, and remember my deeper mission to show up for the dreams I still have yet to fulfill?
All I know for sure is that I came home not healed, not complete, but unmistakably more myself. More willing to be looked at, more willing to take up space, more willing to receive — help, money, gifts, admiration — without shrinking first. Hell, I even came back with a steal of a wedding dress chosen by my parents!
As this August unfolds, I’m preparing to start my postpartum doula training and teaching glee camp for children for the first time. It's work I've wanted to move toward for a while: supporting mothers and babies through a season that asks for a village most of us don't have here.
As I tune in with how much more aligned I feel with the life I’m living and the life I want to live, I see the emergence of the version of me who isn't waiting for permission anymore. And despite so much uncertainty still, I am truly happy.
Reflection like this doesn't happen on its own. It takes writing it down, sharing it out loud, moving my body, praying — on purpose. It would be easy to let it all get swallowed by the whirlwind of getting back to normal programming, but here we are, taking everything one moment at a time. I trust that more will continue dropping in as I stay devoted to dropping in too.
So I’m back, and my August calendar for bodywork is open!
I'm showing up present, grounded, and genuinely glad to be back in this work with you.
Book your August session here → https://mamakosmosbookwithme.as.me/
Grateful for you, and for all of it.
Big hugs,
Keani
MAMA KOSMOS
