family – Latansani

Gifts We Carry

On Christmas Eve, we carry gifts, carefully wrapped, hidden under twinkling lights, each one chosen with thought and love. Some are small, some grand, but all are offered with the hope that they will bring joy. The gifts we carry are not only the ones we set under a tree. Each of us carries other offerings: our hearts, love, and hope.

As a celebrant, I bring those gifts daily. I stand with people at the most sacred thresholds of their lives.

I witness beginnings and endings, holding joy, grief, hope, and rupture. I speak words when others cannot find their own. I bless unions, honour deaths, and mark moments that will be remembered long after the day itself has passed.

But behind the role and ritual, behind the calm and carefully chosen language, there is a most simple human being. Another thinking, feeling, vulnerable person who also needs the gift of love and care.

2025 has been for many of us, a year of severance. It has been a year of letting go, and not always by choice. I saw it in the ceremonies I held and felt it in my own life. People losing – work, partners, relationships; losing possibility, as well as certainty; and people losing the deep belief that true love is real, that love is something we can rely on to see us through. To lose faith in love is not just painful; it is devastating, decimating, disorienting. It breaks our resolve and shakes the entire ground beneath.

There have been moments this year when I wondered whether love was still possible in the way I had once believed in it – not as a means of rescue, not as fantasy, but as something steady and real.

And yet, again and again, the couples I married this year gently challenged that doubt. I watched them stand before one another not promising perfection or salvation, but presence. They chose love with eyes open, aware of each other’s histories, complexities, and unfinished edges. Their vows were not about being rescued, but about walking alongside; not about grand gestures, but about daily devotion. In their steadiness, their laughter, their willingness to be fully seen, they reminded me that love does not need to be loud to be profound. It simply needs to be true.

This year, I was also held by a very different kind of love – the love of my granddaughters.

Their love is innocent and pure, unburdened by history or expectation. It does not ask me to be anything other than present. In their eyes, I am already enough. Their laughter, their small hands reaching for mine, their unguarded trust reminded me of a truth we so easily forget: love, at its essence, is simple. It is not earned. It is given freely. Being with them returned me, again and again, to a place before doubt…before stories of loss and protection took hold. They showed me love as blessing, not transaction.

And then there is the love that brings us all here on earth – the journey to love ourselves.

Self-love is not indulgence or ego; it is responsibility. It is choosing to care for the part of ourselves that feels deeply in a world where hurt can be inflicted so easily, often unintentionally, as others move through their own journeys of pain, fear, and becoming. To love oneself is to learn when to open and when to protect, when to soften and when to stand firm.

Rising above hurt does not mean bypassing it. It means seeing it clearly, tending to it gently, and refusing to let it harden the heart. It means recognising that another’s wounds do not define our worth, and that compassion can coexist with boundaries.

What I am beginning to sense now, as 2026 approaches, is a different invitation to love.

Love, I am learning again and again, is about being seen.

Seen in our grief.

Seen in our contradictions.

Seen in our strength and in our exhaustion.

Seen without needing to be more polished, more healed, more “together.”

2026 is the year to be seen! This is the spirit I feel gathering…

A year of connection…not just between partners or families, but between our inner lives and our outer ones. A reconnection to self, to meaning, to one another. A softening back into relationship.

A year of gratitude…the kind that arises naturally when we survive something difficult and discover that tenderness is still possible. Gratitude for the people who hold us, the rituals that ground us, and the quiet moments that restore us.

A year of creation…new ceremonies, new ways of marking life, new language for love and loss. Creation that flows not from obligation, nor from ritual but from truth.

And a year of richness…richness of feeling, of presence, of spiritual depth. Oh, I hope that there will be material abundance too. But above all, I hope that this year, my life and the lives of those around me will feel inhabited rather than endured.

As I prepare to gift others through weddings, farewells, namings, and renewals in the year ahead, I am also tending to my own heart. I will allow myself to be held. To be rested. To be seen.

Because even those who guide others through rites of passage are always, quietly, moving through one of their own.

On this Christmas Eve, as you carry your gifts and watch the faces of those you love, may you also pause to honour the invisible treasures you carry – the courage, compassion, and love that make life sacred.

Merry Christmas!

Julie

Love in Motion: A Mother’s Rite of Passage

I’ve navigated a good few rites of passage in my life – marriage, motherhood, the sweetest transition into becoming a grandmother, and so many more quiet thresholds in between. But nothing has felt quite like this moment: standing at the threshold of another letting go, not of a child, but of a man – my son – who is approaching his 40th year on this planet and who has just gone through something I experienced many times – a grueling Oftsed inspection.

He’s tall and steady now, in senior leadership in a big secondary school, a father himself, with two daughters of his own. On the day of his unannounced inspection, I watched how he rushed in, after 12 hours at work, to cuddle his girls before bedtime.

I watch him nuzzle their necks, hold their hands, guide them, make mistakes, learn, and love in his own way. I feel an overwhelming sense of pride. And at the same time, a quiet ache.

I’ll never forget the moment I watched him marry. As the mother of the groom, it’s a peculiar and profound role…so different from the fairy-tale spotlight so often placed on the father of the bride. We aren’t typically the ones walking anyone down the aisle, or making grand speeches. We’re often quietly watching from the edge, holding a hundred memories in our hearts while our sons take a step we’ve known was coming but still feels like another tiny goodbye. It’s a moment of silent surrender, handing over the centre of his world to another, while blessing the union with love and restraint. The pride is deep but so is the ache. And yet, this too is part of the great letting go. This too, is love in motion.

Because here’s the truth no one prepares us for: motherhood is the long, slow practice of preparing the one you cannot live without, to live without you.

This isn’t a clean break. It’s not a dramatic severing of ties. It’s a subtle, complex, deeply emotional shift and one that unfolds in moments so ordinary they can almost pass unnoticed: a text replied to hours later, a celebration planned without you, a quiet gap where your voice used to be central. No longer being the first person they turn to, but one of many they might update. The shift from “What do you think, Mum?” to “I thought you’d like to know what I chose.”

And while I’ve known for ever that this is what love demands…this loving and letting go…nothing truly equips a mother to emotionally detach from the very being who taught her the depth of unconditional love.

Letting go isn’t just an act of love – it’s also a process of grief. It’s remembering the baby we held, the little child who needed us daily. It’s missing the rhythm of that caretaking, the identity that came with being at the heart of someone’s world. And now, it’s watching the cycle again, as I witness my daughter-in-law prepare to go back to work after the birth of their second child.

Yes, there is pride. Joy. Relief even, sometimes. But it’s tangled with sadness and nostalgia. A mother’s heart can be both full and empty.

There’s a beautiful transformation in my stage of life: shifting from being the hands-on caregiver to becoming a quiet supporter, an emotional anchor, a presence rather than a guide.

I’ve had to really learn to respect his family’s space, to trust his choices. And that’s no small feat after decades of being a protector and guide. But he doesn’t need that from me. What he needs is for me to see him fully, as the man he has become, and to love him from a place of respectful distance. I am so proud of him.

And my identity? That too is evolving. I’m more than a mother. I’m a nanna, a celebrant, a storyteller, and a witness to life in all its beauty and ache. Letting go has cracked me open…but you know the saying…where there are cracks, the light is coming in.

As a rite of passage celebrant, I speak often of thresholds. We mark births, deaths, marriages, retirements but this, this shift in the mother-child bond as our children become fully themselves, this too deserves ritual and reflection. Our culture doesn’t celebrate a mother’s rite of passage at all!

It is a rite that is so often invisible, but it is sacred. It is one of the deepest initiations of a woman’s life.

So to any mother walking this path with me, I say: you are not alone. You are not weak for grieving. You are not clingy for caring. You are not outdated because your child no longer needs you in the same way. You are simply crossing a threshold. One where your love is no longer shown in holding tight but in letting go with grace.

The poet Rumi said, “Life is a balance between holding on and letting go.”

And if you, like me, are learning this balance in real time, know this: there is a new kind of relationship waiting on the other side. One built on respect, space, and mutual admiration. It’s not the same as it was but it can be just as beautiful.

This, too, is love.

Love in motion!