Two Mugs: When Something Broken Still Holds Love

A broken coffee mug sits quietly on a shelf in my room.

I haven't been able to throw it away.

To anyone else, it probably looks like exactly what it is: a broken mug. Something that has served its purpose and belongs in the trash. But every time I look at it, I don't see shattered ceramic.

I see my mother.

She gave me that mug years ago, before we became estranged. On it are the words, Happiness comes from within.

I loved it from the moment she gave it to me. Not just because I loved the message, but because it felt like my mom had seen me when she picked it out.

She knew those words would mean something to me.

There was something about receiving it that made me feel understood by her. Like she knew this part of who I was and had chosen something specifically because it reminded her of me.

I drank my coffee from that mug every day.

And then one day, it broke.

I was standing in my kitchen getting ready to make myself a cup of coffee. I had the mug in my hand when the very bottom of it lightly tapped the corner of our granite countertop.

That was it.

I didn't drop it. I didn't throw it. I wasn't being careless with it.

It barely tapped the counter.

But the entire bottom cracked off and fell to the floor.

I remember standing there for a second, almost in shock.

After all those years of using it, it was just...broken.

There was no fixing it.

I cried.

Not a few disappointed tears over losing a favorite coffee cup. I was genuinely heartbroken.

And for a moment, I almost felt ridiculous.

It was a mug.

Except it wasn't.

I picked up the pieces. I even cut my hand on one of them.

And eventually, I did what we do with things that are broken beyond repair.

I threw it in the trash.

But only a few minutes later, I went back and got it.

I couldn't leave it there.

Because even though I knew I could never drink from it again, even though I knew there was no way to put it back together and make it serve the purpose it once had, I still loved it.

I couldn't save it.

But I wasn't ready to let it go.

By the time that mug broke, my mother and I had already been estranged for years.

And still, every morning, I drank from something she had given me.

I think I understand now why that mattered so much.

It was a connection to my mother that felt safe.

I could wrap my hands around something she had chosen for me and remember a time when our relationship was different.

The mug didn't require anything from me.

I didn't have to compromise my boundaries to keep it. I didn't have to reopen a relationship that I knew wasn't healthy for me. I didn't have to explain myself, defend myself, or pretend that the things that happened between us hadn't happened.

I could simply drink my coffee and still have this tiny, ordinary connection to my mom.

And maybe I understand something else now too.

The mug allowed me to hold onto a particular version of her.

The truth is, I don't really know who my mother is today. We haven't been part of each other's lives for years. There are things I've heard and things I've witnessed from a distance that have made me wonder about the person she has become.

But when I wrapped my hands around that mug every morning, none of that was what I thought about.

I thought about my mom and the person she used to be in my life.

The woman who knew me well enough to see a mug that said Happiness comes from within and think of me.

The woman I have memories with that existed long before there was estrangement.

Sometimes now, when I try to remember conversations we once had, the sound of her laugh or her voice I once heard so often, I have to concentrate.

It's beginning to fade.

I have old voicemails from her that I've never been able to bring myself to listen to.

I know what's on them.

She's calling just to talk. She's asking how things are going. She's telling me she loves me.

And maybe that's exactly why I can't press play.

Because I know the voice I would hear on the other end is the version of my mother I miss so deeply.

I'm not ready to make that version of her vivid again just to hear the message end and remember that she isn't that person in my life anymore.

The mug was different.

It gave me a way to remember her gently.

I didn't have to figure out who she is today in order to love who she was to me then.

Maybe that's what shattered when the mug did.

Not my connection to her entirely.

But one of the last physical pieces of it.

I don't have many things from my mother anymore.

There won't be new gifts or new cards. There aren't new photographs or little things she sees in a store and picks up because they remind her of me.

That mug was the last gift she ever gave me.

And when it broke, something about that felt terribly final.

Maybe that's why throwing it in the trash felt like more than throwing away something that could no longer hold my coffee.

It felt like throwing away a piece of her.

And I couldn't do it.

Because the truth is, I don't hate my mother.

I miss her.

I wish things didn't have to be this way.

And sometimes I think estrangement gets flattened into something much simpler than it actually is. As though choosing not to have someone in your life must mean you stopped loving them. As though deciding a relationship can no longer continue requires you to erase everything good that existed before it.

That hasn't been my experience.

My mother and I tried to repair our relationship early in our estrangement.

It didn't work.

Eventually, I had to accept something I never wanted to accept: I could love something deeply and still be unable to save it.

Maybe that's another reason I couldn't throw the mug away.

I had already learned what it felt like to let go of the relationship.

I wasn't willing to believe that meant I also had to throw away the love.

I can know that walking away was the right decision for me and still feel sadness about what was lost.

I can remember painful things and still treasure beautiful ones.

I can love pieces of my mother while accepting that our relationship is broken.

Because even what’s left of that mug remind me that there are still pieces of my mother I will always love.

It can't hold my coffee anymore.

But somehow, it still holds the love.

Shortly after my mug broke, my daughter came home with another one for me.

She knew how upset I had been.

My daughter probably didn't understand everything that was underneath my sadness when the mug broke. I don't know that she could have.

But she didn't need to understand it completely.

She understood that it mattered to me.

And maybe that's another kind of being seen.

I've spent much of my life feeling misunderstood because I experience things deeply. I've slowly learned that the people who love me don't necessarily have to understand why I find meaning in the things I do.

They just have to understand that I do.

My daughter didn't need to understand why a broken coffee mug made her mother cry.

She just saw that it did.

She knows how much I love my coffee. She knows it isn't really just coffee for me. It's part of my morning, part of my writing, part of the quiet time I spend sitting at my desk creating and thinking and simply being.

She saw that a little piece of that routine had broken.

And she brought me another one.

Maybe, in her own way, she was trying to help make something whole again.

It wasn't meant to replace the one my mother had given me. I don't think either of us thought about it that way.

And it doesn't replace it.

But looking at the two mugs now, it's difficult not to see the symbolism.

One was given to me by the family I came from.

The other was given to me by the family I've created.

And both were given to me by someone who saw me.

My mother once walked past a mug that said Happiness comes from within and thought of her daughter.

Years later, my daughter saw that her mother had lost something that mattered to her and thought, Maybe I can give her something new to hold.

There is something about that that makes my heart ache and feel incredibly full at the same time.

There's an irony in the words on my mother's mug that I didn't fully appreciate until now.

Happiness comes from within.

That mug sat beside me through some of the most transformative years of my life.

I drank from it while I was learning how to live without my mother in my life.

It sat on my desk while I worked through grief, anger, guilt, acceptance, forgiveness and all the complicated emotions that come with choosing distance from someone you still love.

It was there while I began writing.

It was there while I wrote a book about coming back to yourself.

A book I eventually called Within.

And all this time, sitting beside me, were those words.

Happiness comes from within.

I don't think the lesson was that I needed to stop loving my mother in order to find happiness.

Maybe it was almost the opposite.

I had to learn that I could love her and still choose myself.

I could miss her and still maintain distance.

I could treasure what was beautiful without using those memories to convince myself that what hurt didn't matter.

And perhaps happiness coming from within was never about becoming so healed that nothing hurts anymore.

Maybe it was about finally trusting myself enough to hold all of it.

My birthday is next week.

And I think that's part of why these two mugs are pulling at me so much right now.

Birthdays used to feel special.

No matter how old I got, my mom would call me on my birthday and sing happy birthday to me.

My dad would call too.

He would send me a card because he knew I collected them.

This year, neither of those things will happen.

My dad died earlier this year, and there is a deep sadness in knowing there will never be another birthday card from him to add to my collection.

There will never be another phone call.

There will never be another gift in the mail.

But there is also certainty in that grief.

I know why the call isn't coming.

I know that if he were still here, he would call.

I know there would be another card.

I know there would be a gift that made him think of me.

The grief I carry for my mother is different.

She is still here on this earth.

And yet, when my birthday comes, the experience will look much the same.

There won't be a phone call.

She won't sing happy birthday to me.

There won't be a card to add to my collection.

And I won’t receive anymore gifts.

For the first time in my life, my birthday will come and neither of my parents will acknowledge the day their daughter was born.

It's difficult to explain what it feels like to hold those two kinds of grief at the same time.

One is infinitely permanent.

The other leaves a sliver of hope for the future.

But because of the pain and the patterns of the past, I've learned not to hold that hope too tightly.

I can leave room for the possibility that something could someday change without requiring myself to wait for it.

Maybe that's another kind of letting go.

Not giving up hope completely.

Just learning how to hold it with an open hand.

Maybe that's why I miss drinking from that damn mug so much.

I love the mug my daughter gave me.

Every time I use it, I'm reminded that she noticed. She knew something mattered to me even if she didn't completely understand why, and she wanted to give me something new to hold.

That mug is very special to me too.

But loving the new one doesn't make me miss the old one any less.

Maybe I once thought healing was supposed to work differently than that.

That eventually the new life becomes so beautiful that you stop grieving the old one.

That gratitude replaces sadness.

That moving forward means leaving everything behind.

I don't believe that anymore.

There is room for both.

There is room for the woman who is deeply grateful for the family she has created and the little girl inside of her who still misses her mom.

There is room to know I made the right decision and wish with everything in me that the right decision hadn't been necessary.

There is room to pour my coffee into the mug my daughter gave me and still glance at the broken one sitting on the shelf.

And when my office is finished, that broken mug will have a place there.

I don't think I'll ever throw it away.

It will sit in the room where I write. Where I create. Where I continue building a life that feels more like mine than perhaps it ever has before.

Maybe someone else will look at it and wonder why I kept something broken.

But I'll know.

I'll know that once, my mother saw that mug and thought of me.

I'll know that there was love there.

I'll know that some of it hurt.

I'll know that both things can be true.

And I'll know that I don't have to throw away the broken pieces of what came before in order to cherish what I'm holding now.

Are you still holding onto something special even if the person who gave it to you isn’t in your life anymore?

What does it hold for you—a memory, a connection, love, grief… or maybe a little bit of all of it?