To mark Mother’s Day this weekend, Angelina Jolie wrote a personal op-ed for The New York Times where she opened up about losing her mom Marcheline Bertrand to ovarian cancer and her role as a mother to Knox, Vivienne, Pax, Shiloh, Maddox and Zahara with Brad Pitt. “I lost my mother in my thirties,” the 44-year-old wrote. ”When I look back to that time, I can see how much her death changed me. It was not sudden, but so much shifted inside. Losing a mother‘s love and warm, soft embrace is like having someone rip away a protective blanket,” she wrote.

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The Maleficent actress also reflected on her father Jon Voight’s affair and how it changed the course of her mom’s life. “It set her dream of family life ablaze. But she still loved being a mother,” Angelina wrote. “Her dreams of being an actor faded as she found herself, at the age of 26, raising two children with a famous ex who would cast a long shadow on her life,” she added. ”After she died, I found a video of her acting in a short film. She was good. It was all possible for her.”

After losing her mom, she decided to get a small tattoo of the letter ‘W’ on her hand in reference to the Rolling Stones song Winter which her mom would sing to her as a little girl. “It sure been a cold, cold winter,” she would sing to me. And at the line, “I wanna wrap my coat around you,” she would wrap me up in my blankets and snuggle me.” She specifically chose her hand as the place for the tattoo, knowing that it would fade more quickly. “As the ‘W’ faded on my hand, so did that feeling of home and protection,” Jolie wrote.

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“But now, with my girls growing up and being the ages I remember so well as a daughter, I am rediscovering my mother and her spirit.” she wrote. “When your children come into your life, they immediately and forever come first.”