Who is Showing Up For You?
School photo of author, Marcela Gomez, circa 1972.
Recently, it was brought to my attention that I didn’t show up as myself with everyone in my life. I guess this is not unusual—since we all embody different identities. I am an entrepreneur, a speaker, an author, a mother, a sister, a friend, and so on. How I show up when I embody one of those identities may be slightly different, but still fully me. However, showing up in a way that is so different that you don’t realize it until someone else says it out loud, was impossible for me to ignore.
“You are very different when you are with your mother.”
I was 57 years old when two people I love said this to me. What does that mean? How am I different?
As someone who seeks to grow spiritually and expand my life, I’ve learned that the first step to spiritual growth is to heal something in your life.
Healing isn’t something you choose when everything feels fine. It doesn’t come when life is working, when you feel fulfilled, or when you're happy.
The choice to heal your emotional wounds—to begin the deep journey of healing your soul—usually comes when something in your life is falling apart… or when something inside you simply can’t take it anymore.
I sat with the words these two people I love had said to me. I searched my heart and sat in silence to feel my emotions as I repeated those words to myself.
My body became stiff. A knot formed in my stomach. Sweat began to rise all over my body. My jaw clenched.
Were these emotions always here, and I had just gotten used to them?
After what seemed like hours of sitting with these feelings and the words circling my mind—“You are a different person when you are with your mother”—I allowed myself to cry.
And it was then that I realized:
When I am in the presence of my mother, I feel fear.
I listen to my body. I hear those words in my mind over and over again. My body developed fear in my childhood as a bodyguard and I got used to its presence. It’s not because my mother is an aggressive or horrible person. The fear that guards my body is the fear of making her cry, of upsetting her, of being in her way.
As I remember it, as my body has absorbed it, she wasn’t able to be available to me. Her sadness was palpable to me. I spent most of my time at a friend’s house, playing outside, or running from one house to another with neighborhood friends.
My sock had holes. It needed to be mend. I don’t know if I can ask her. She is in her bedroom. Is she sad? Is she angry? I walk slowly into her room, sock in hand. “What do you want?” —My sock has holes. She told me to get a lightbulb, place it inside the sock and sew it. The lightbulb would hold the sock in place and make it easier to sew the two sides together. I was very proud of myself for making it work. And, although I can see this moment as a teaching moment from my mother to me, it developed in my mind and body as a sign that asking for help would bother her.
That’s when self-reliance, another bodyguard, showed up.
As children, we create mechanisms that help us survive and make sense of our world. As we grow older, those mechanisms stay with us like loyal bodyguards we no longer see. They become part of who we are—and show up whenever our inner child believes we need them.
I don’t know exactly how my parents met or what the circumstances were when I was conceived. I know they got married when my mother was four months pregnant with me. I’ve seen footage of their wedding—they looked happy, smiling. That makes me believe it wasn’t a forced marriage. But then again, it was 1964. It would’ve been awful for my mother to be a single mother at the time.
It was in my 40s when I watched the footage of their wedding over and over again. I called my mother crying, telling her that my dad looked happy in the footage, that they both were smiling and enjoying the wedding. She agreed. She said, “Yes, we were both happy.”
Why is this important to me?
As I write this, I am tearing up.
It matters because, for as long as I can remember, my mother has spoken ill of my dad—as if he had no redeeming qualities. As if he had not at any point in their life together been in love with her, with us as a family, with me as his first daughter.
The last time she said something terrible about him in front of me was during a Thanksgiving Holiday when I was visiting my mother and siblings in Miami. I was 57 years old. This time, her words felt different—deeper. Impossible to contain or pack away. Her words pierced so deeply that it felt like they popped a balloon inside my body. I felt my entire body curling inward like a ball, holding my head in full protection mode.
For days after that Thanksgiving holiday words kept circling in my brain over and over again.
“You are a different person when you are with your mother.”
“Your father was…and did this…and did that…”
My father died in 1996.
According to my brother-in-law, my mother only mentions my father when I am around.
Do I remind her of why she had to marry him?
Do I resemble him so much that all the pain she lived with surfaces and spills onto me?
This time, I couldn’t find a place to hide. I didn’t know how to protect myself from her words—or where to put them. The balloon had burst. I couldn’t escape. My body was in so much pain.
Was that balloon the place where I had stored all her words before? And now that it’s gone, what—or who—came out of it?
I stayed at her home for three days after Thanksgiving. I spent those three days hiding in a bedroom with the shades closed, only coming out to eat and use the bathroom. I couldn’t understand why I was hiding. What was I so afraid of? I just couldn’t bring myself to just walk out of the bedroom and visit with my mother, or sit at the dining table to eat. I stayed in the room. She said nothing.
In an incredible turn of events, my sister and brother-in-law arrived by surprise.
My sister opened the bedroom door and playfully yelled, “What are you hiding in here?”
I felt like a rescued princess in a tower.
As soon as I saw her, I began to cry. She looked puzzled. I told her I couldn’t stay there—that I didn’t feel safe.
She told me to pack my things and go home with them. I did.
As I walked out of my mother’s apartment, I couldn’t look her in the eyes, I couldn’t hug her goodbye, I didn’t want her to touch me, I just wanted to hurry out, as if I were going to be grounded for something I had done.
I was 57 years old.
On several occasions, I’ve shared with my brother and sister things my mother has said or done. And both of them have asked me why I don’t tell her not to do it or ask her why she does it. Every single time I have responded to my siblings’ advice with, “No, I couldn’t.”
But why couldn’t I?
What holds me back from standing up for myself?
What holds me back is my old, faithful bodyguard: fear.
Growing up, my mother was physically present, but not emotionally present. She was always sad and unapproachable.
My father was not always physically there—he was a helicopter pilot working in the Amazon on the oil pipeline.
But when he was home, he and I would spend a lot of time together.
One of our favorite things to do together was go for popsicles. He couldn’t eat them because he had sensitive teeth, so I would get a lemon one—our shared favorite—and he’d take a bite out of mine every single time even with the pain of sensitive teeth.
This ritual happened until his last days on Earth.
For some reason those moments created in me a sense of being seen and safe.
My father was not always present for me either, on several occasions when we were together he would pick up women in his car and make me sit in the back seat.
In the days that followed my “rescue” by my sister and brother-in-law, it was my sister who advised me to go to therapy.
I had never considered it. The culture I grew up in followed the “get over it” philosophy. The Christian faith I had spent 35 years in believed “Jesus heals everything.”
But this was no longer true for me. I was in so much pain.
The pain—the “I can’t take it anymore”—became a loyal friend that led me to therapy.
My therapist came recommended by a friend from middle school. This meant a lot to me. She is one of those friends who met me in my early teenage years before the masks and the hidden places made appearances in my life.
As soon as I met him (my therapist—not my “prince”) over a virtual call, I began to cry like a child.
What a relief!
I started therapy.
Through meditation, conversation, crying, laughter, listening, absorbing, and sharing—my heart and body have healed.
The “aha” moments are beautiful and freeing.
Therapy, I’ve learned, is not about changing the outside situations.
It’s about clearing the rooms in your soul, mind, and body—to find peace and joy even in the midst of outside chaos.
Am I done with therapy? Am I completely healed?
Absolutely not!
As someone who loves checking off to-do lists and tearing up paper to declare: “It’s done,”—I’ve had to learn that I will never be done with healing, and this is something I’ve made peace with.
Am I still in fear when I think about my mother?
Yes, I am.
In February 2025, something happened. Words came from her that made me feel as if I had been pushed off a cliff.
The feeling of being pushed… of having my feelings rejected… summoned one of my bodyguards—fear.
But this time was different.
This time, it didn’t hold me back, this time I answered back.
I responded to her texts to defend myself—to make a stand.
I’ve had enough.
My body was still stiff. My stomach in a knot. Sweating. Crying.
I found myself in a dark tunnel that I am still in, but that now I can see a dim light at the end.
What was different this time?
Why did I answer back?
That same day, minutes before the word exchange in the family text group, during my therapy session, my therapist said to me—twice in a row:
“You need to decide what type of adult daughter you want to be.”
Adult daughter?
Was I not already an adult?
Why did I have to decide what type of adult daughter I wanted to be?
Aha!
I’d never really met myself as an adult daughter to my mother—I had only ever reenacted the child daughter. The five-year-old me who feared making her mother mad… making her sad… disturbing her.
The me who could not stand up for herself and, when she has tried, has been branded the victim,spoiled, impertinent, rude, selfish.
“You are a different person when you are with your mother.”
Of course I was.
The adult me is now showing up—for me, and for the world.
The adult me has had enough, has set boundaries with her mother out of love for herself, not fear of her mother.
As for my relationship with my mother—it’s estranged now.
Based on my most recent interactions with my mother, she doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know how to have a relationship with her oldest adult daughter.
And I’m okay with that. I can love her from afar.
I want to live a life of freedom from the tower my bodyguards created for me as a child.
My bodyguards are still with me—watching to see if they need to show up again big time.
I’m in no hurry for them to go away.
They have protected me for 60 years.
They will dissolve when they know I feel safe.
In what relationships do you feel like you can’t fully show up as your true self—and what emotions arise when you’re with that person or in that situation?
What “bodyguards” from your childhood—like fear, silence, or perfectionism—might still be protecting you today?
If you could choose what kind of adult son or daughter you want to be, what would that look like—and what would need to shift for you to live into that version of yourself?