My Mom Believes This Is All Part of God's Plan. I Don't.
On Having the Conversation You're Afraid to Have
This isn’t going to become a Substack about my relationship with my mom. One reason is editorial—that isn’t what you signed up for. But another reason is respect: my mom wasn’t mad that I wrote last week’s piece about being afraid to call her, and I think she sees this as a conversation between the two of us. But I don’t want to exhaust her patience. She’s being generous in letting me share even this much. After this, I plan to go back to our regularly scheduled of program—you’ll still hear about me personally, but this Substack won’t become a public therapy session. But after last week’s piece, so many people reached out via DM asking if I’d talked to her and how it went. And the conversation we did have surfaced some insights about religion and theology that feel worth sharing.
When I say my mom reads my Substack, I mean she reads every single one. So I knew she’d seen last week’s piece about being afraid to call her. I also knew she’d probably call me if I didn’t call her first. I posted on Sunday which is her church day, so we don’t usually talk on that day. But the snow had canceled services. She waited until my stepfather was upstairs in his office so she could have privacy. And then she called me.
We started how we always start. The weather. How much snow they got in rural Pennsylvania. I told her I was glad they still had the wood stove and the deep freezer full of food, that I didn’t worry about them losing power. We talked about their snow removal guy who died last year, how they’re shoveling themselves large sections of the driveway in their late seventies. We talked about my puppy Stella loving the snow, about the college interview Zoe had that week and how proud I was about how confident she’s become through this whole process of presenting herself to adults, thinking about who she is and wants to become.
And then, because she hadn’t brought it up yet, I said: “So I think I know why you called.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Is that true? Are you really afraid to call me? Or did you just say that for the Substack?”
“No, Mom. I didn’t do it for clickbait. It’s really how I feel.” And then I braced myself for an uncomfortable fight.
My mom and I have a good relationship but the truth is, we don’t fight well. We communicate very differently. And I know I’m hard to fight with—I can get loud, I can get aggressive, I can get moody. Just ask my partner, he has to deal with it all the time. But here’s the thing: my partner and I are actually quite good at fighting, at resolving conflict. Our styles complement each other. My mom and I have never figured out how to fight in a way that works for both of us. Our styles clash. We fall into a pattern where—from my perspective—she fights the way she used to fight with my dad. She’s told me before that I treat her like my dad treated her. When we fight I think she sees me as someone who doesn’t respect her. I hear her as defensive and overly-sensitive. And the worst fight we’ve ever had was about how my stepfather he treated me. I’ve never gotten over the feeling that she picked him over me—which, I know, she should. He’s her husband. I’m a grown woman (I was 30 at the time). She has every right to do that. But there’s still this feeling of loss there.
And last Sunday I thought we were going to get into another bad fight when she started by saying I’d made a lot of assumptions about her in that piece. I just listened. Any assumptions I make come from the fact that she’s never told me she didn’t vote for Trump. She’s told me before that who you vote for is very private, and implied that she’s she has voted differently than her husband—both my dad and my stepdad. But she’s never said it out loud.
“I’m just trying to protect my family,” she said. “My very small family. I’m visiting my sisters, volunteering at church, spending time with my husband. I can’t be someone out there protesting.”
This is a conversation we’ve had before, about letting things go for domestic harmony. It first came up around LGBT rights, when I told her I couldn’t be with someone who didn’t believe in gay marriage, who thought same-sex sex was a sin. She said not everyone can have a partner like Alexis. I heard that. But it’s a really different way of seeing what we expect from the people we love.
But I didn’t say that.
Instead, I said: “I just want you to know that’s not how I’m feeling right now. I’m feeling scared and angry and worried and frustrated and unsure. And it hurts that I feel like I can’t share those things with you, because I’m not sure you’re feeling the same way. That feels really hard for me.”
I was crying when I said it. And I think that helped. I think when she hears me as debating or arguing—when she thinks I’m steamrolling, which is what she’s accused me of before—she gets brittle and defensive. But raw emotion is different. It’s witness, not argument. I was trying to share how hurt I was by the idea that our politics might not align right now.
After I posted last week’s piece, someone commented that it is particularly difficult when we don’t politically agree with our parents because these are the people who gave us our core values. That’s exactly right. It was incredibly helpful to have someone name that. It’s funny because I talk about core values all the time, it’s a key part of how I think about the ethics of spiritual practices in the wellness industry. But I’d forgotten to apply it to this very personal case. My core values feel violated right now because my mom is the one who gave them to me. That’s what makes this so painful. This is an interpersonal, family-based form of moral injury—another concept I’ve written about before.
And then as some point in the conversation my mom talked about how what comforts her when she feels overwhelmed is her belief in God. How she can pray. How she doesn’t understand why all this is happening, but it must be part of God’s plan. She referenced a piece I wrote recently about trust—see, my mom really does read my Substack. She brought up that post about trust and said, “Well, I do have that trust in God, and it helps me.”
This is an important theological difference between us (my mom, a practicing Lutheran, and me, non-religiously affiliated but religiously curious) that is helpful to name. The idea that this is all part of God’s plan—I’m not on board with that. That’s a version of Christianity, not the only one, but one that leans into divine predestination or design. And to me, that’s a total deal breaker. The collapse of our democracy, the extreme polarization of our citizens, military operations on our streets, the killing of citizens and noncitizens by ICE agents, calling victims domestic terrorists, the misinformation, the fear, the hate—I can’t conceptualize this as God’s plan. This is a big fucking mess that we made. I blame humans for that, not the divine. It doesn’t give me comfort to think of suffering divine design. Instead it makes me confront what feels fundamentally selfish and broken in humanity.
I listened to a podcast this week where a guest said something similar—that faith allows you to assume everything will turn out okay. And I just kept thinking: That’s not true. It doesn’t always turn out okay. Not for everyone. What I’ve learned from people who are different from me, who live under conditions of structural injustice in ways I don’t, is that we often just repeat these really bad human problems. Over and over.
The theology of “God’s plan” offers comfort in the face of being overwhelmed. I get that. My mom feels overwhelmed and this helps. This framework gives her relief, lets her hand over what she can’t control. But here’s my struggle: When we say “it’s all part of the plan,” we risk absolving ourselves of responsibility for the mess. We give up human agency at the exact moment we most need it.
I am actually drawn to the idea of a higher power, but in a different way. For me, the core value of a higher power isn’t about trust or surrender—it’s about decentering. I’m not God. Humanity isn’t the center of everything. That decentering, that humility, I find incredibly valuable. But handing over agency to a divine plan? I can’t get there. Because if this isn’t a plan, if this is just us repeating patterns of cruelty and indifference and structural violence, then it’s on us to interrupt it.
Here’s what else happened in that conversation: My mom said she looked at the videos of Renee Good’s death. The ones showing what happened versus what her husband was telling her happened. “I know what he’s hearing,” she said. “But then I looked at the videos, and that’s not what’s happening.”
That made me feel better. Not just because it suggested she’s fact-checking, but because it means she’s still wrestling. She’s not settled. And I think—reading between all the silences and things she won’t say out loud—I think we actually might have voted the same way in the last election.
I’m not writing this to celebrate some big breakthrough. We’re not suddenly aligned. She’s still navigating her very small family, her marriage, her church, her overwhelm. But she looked at the videos. She’s voting her conscience. That’s not nothing.
It’s also not fast. And I think that’s what I want to say to everyone who wrote to me after last week’s piece, everyone sitting with similar fear and grief about the people they love: This is the long work.
I’m not a therapist, but in seems to me that family conversations aren’t where you win political arguments. But they can be where persuasion actually happens—slowly, through sustained relationship and patient witness. Someone commented that my mom’s views don’t matter, that I shouldn’t worry about that relationship. But that feels wrong to me. If any of this ends well, it’s because some people change their minds. And you have a much better chance of reaching someone in your family than someone you’re protesting against on the street.
I’m not saying everyone needs to prioritize these relationships the same way—some family dynamics are genuinely unsafe or harmful. But for me, this conversation is part of the work.
What I learned: Vulnerability works when argument doesn’t. When I stopped trying to be right and just let her see how scared I am, something shifted. Maybe that’s a spiritual practice—the refusal to perform strength, the willingness to be witnessed in pain.
I also learned that the fractures are deeper than politics. The theological framework underneath—”God’s plan” versus human accountability—shapes a lot. It determines whether we think resistance is necessary or futile, whether we see ourselves as agents or observers.
And I learned that people are still looking, still questioning, even when they can’t say it out loud. That the work of changing minds happens in kitchens and phone calls on snow days, not just in viral posts or street protests.
This whole thing is making me think about the really deep divisions in families right now—how they’re generational and intergenerational, how they’re another form of grief we’re all carrying. How they can’t be easily put back together.
But we keep trying anyway. Because what else is there to do?
Thank you to everyone who commented and messaged after last week’s piece. I see you. And I appreciate you seeing me.
i struggle in a similar way. i love loretta ross’s teachings “call people in don’t call them out.”
“My core values feel violated.”
This hit deep for me in regard to how I sit in relation to my parents and my ex-husband, about politics and relationships, etc.
I stay in relationship because I believe there is good there.
I’m finding myself sitting between what is God’s plan and the repetition of patterns of cruelty that exist. Thanks for the brain food.