You Can See Her and Still Need More
A note before we begin: this is for daughters of emotionally unavailable mothers who loved them imperfectly. If your mother’s harm was something else: colder, more deliberate, more cruel, this isn’t the post for you today. That post is coming. You deserve one written for you.
There’s a moment that catches you off guard every time.
It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It might happen at the kitchen table, or on the phone, or in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday when your mother says something or doesn’t say something and something in you goes quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that’s peaceful. The kind that aches.
Because in that moment you weren’t calling to update her on your life. You weren’t calling to mediate the family situation. You weren’t calling to translate the letter from the county, or explain what an HSA is, or talk her through the email from whoever again. You just wanted, for once, for a moment, to be held.
Somewhere between dialing and hanging up, you realize she doesn’t quite know how to do that.
Not because she doesn’t love you. She does. You know she does. She showed up at every school event even when her English wasn’t ready. She worked the jobs. She made the sacrifices. She loved you in every way she knew how, which often looked like feeding you, protecting you, pushing you, and not saying much else.
Emotional availability was not on the syllabus. Nobody taught her or her mother that class.
And here you are. Grown.
Doing your own healing.
Reading the books.
Reading the blogs.
Going to the therapy she still calls “talking to that lady.” Learning the language of feelings she was never given and trying not to use the words at her, because you’ve learned that “I feel dismissed” lands in her ear as an attack.
And sometimes in the middle of all that growing you just want your mom.
Not the strong one. Not the sacrificing one. Not the one who always has an opinion about your hair. The hair, and the outfit could be flawless and she’d still find something to critique.
Just her. Soft. Present. Asking how you really are and knowing how to sit with the answer.
And the grief of realizing that version of her may not exist, not because she’s a bad mother, but because nobody ever mothered her that way either
That grief doesn’t have a clean name.
You’re not grieving a bad mother. You’re grieving the mother she couldn’t be. You’re grieving the girl she had to bury to survive. You’re grieving something that was never quite there and somehow you still feel the absence of it.
And you’re doing all of that while still loving her. While still showing up for her. While still being the one who translates the county letter.
Even now.
What Gets Passed Down
At some point in your healing journey, you’re going to look at your mother differently.
Not worse. Not better. More fully. You’re going to start seeing her not just as your mother but as a woman. A daughter. Someone who was once a girl who needed things she never got. Someone who was shaped by her own family system long before you arrived.
And that seeing? It’s not free. Because once you see it you can’t unsee it.
In a lot of families — families shaped by immigration, by displacement, by racism, by poverty, by a mother who was herself unmothered —emotional expression wasn’t a luxury that was available.
Your grandmother wasn’t sitting your mother down to talk about her feelings. Maybe because she was working three jobs. Maybe because she was depressed and nobody had a name for it. Maybe because she was the eldest daughter too, and nobody ever sat her down either. Maybe because in her generation, in her neighborhood, in her household, that just wasn’t something women did.
There was work to do. There was survival to manage and survival doesn’t always look like immigration. Sometimes it looks like keeping a roof over your kids’ heads after a divorce. Sometimes it looks like raising siblings because your own mother couldn’t. Sometimes it just looks like getting through the day in a house where nobody asked how anyone felt.
So your mother learned what her mother taught her:
Keep moving. Stay strong. Don’t let them see you struggle. Love through action not words. Feed people when you don’t know what else to do. Half our family emotional support came with rice.
She passed that down to you. Not out of cruelty. She gave you what she was given, the only thing she had to give.
You learned a different language.
And now you’re standing in the middle, understanding her world and living in yours and never quite fully landing in either one. Understanding her more than she understands herself sometimes. Grieving what she couldn’t give you while trying not to make her the villain of your story.
That’s an exhausting place to stand.
Holding Two Truths at Once
Maybe it shows up as the guilt you feel when you’re frustrated with her, the voice that says but she did her best cutting off your anger before you’ve finished feeling it.
Maybe it’s the loneliness of being the most emotionally literate person in your family, the unpaid in-house translator, the one who knows what everyone’s actually feeling and also what they’ll never say and not finding anyone in that family who can fully meet you there.
Maybe it’s the strange exhaustion of holding compassion for her while still holding the hurt she caused. Sitting across from her at dinner, watching her be exactly who she’s always been, feeling the love and the loss of it simultaneously.
That’s not confusion. That’s what it actually feels like to hold two truths at once.
💬 Sit With This: Your mother’s inner child is not your responsibility to heal. But seeing her, really seeing her, as a full person shaped by forces bigger than both of you, changes something. It doesn’t erase the hurt. It doesn’t mean you stop needing what you needed. It just adds a layer of understanding that makes the grief more complicated and, eventually, more bearable.
Understanding Her Without Abandoning Yourself
This is not a reconciliation roadmap. Not a guide to having the conversation or writing the letter or finally telling her how you feel. You don’t need another assignment. And you definitely don’t need anyone telling you to just forgive her and move on.
But something small might shift in how you hold this.
It starts with separating two things that have been tangled together for a long time: understanding her and excusing what hurt you. Those are not the same thing. You can see her fully, the girl she was, the woman she became, what she learned to do to get through and still say that wasn’t okay. I needed more than that. The impact was real.
Understanding is not the same as erasing the hurt. Compassion is not the same as pretending it didn’t happen. Seeing her inner child doesn’t mean yours stops mattering.
Then there’s giving yourself permission to grieve without making her the villain. Not because she deserves protection from your grief but because you deserve a grief that’s fully yours. Not tangled up in guilt. Not interrupted by the voice that says but she tried her best. Just yours. Clean. Honest. Allowed.
And letting yourself want what you wanted, without shame or guilt.
You wanted a mother who could hold you. That’s not too much. That’s not ungrateful. That’s just human.
On the days when you can, get curious about her. Not to excuse her. Not to therapize her. Just to wonder, quietly, what she was carrying when she couldn’t show up the way you needed. Not for her sake. For yours.
Because sometimes understanding the shape of someone else’s wound helps you stop taking it so personally.
She couldn’t give what she never received. Some mothers learn later. Some don’t.
That doesn’t make the absence hurt less. It just makes it make more sense.
Some Things Take Time to Untangle
The next time you call her she’ll still be exactly who she is. Some mothers say “I love you.” Some hand you a container of cut fruit and tell you to take it home.
She’ll still give advice when you wanted presence. She’ll still feed you when you needed to be heard. She’ll still love you in the language she was given, the one that looks like doing and rarely like sitting still and asking how you really are.
And you’ll still feel it, the love and the ache sitting side by side.
That doesn’t go away cleanly. It doesn’t get solved by understanding it. But understanding it does something, slowly, quietly, without announcing itself. It loosens what felt locked. Not all the way. Just enough to breathe a little differently inside it.
You are allowed to love her and grieve her at the same time. You are allowed to understand her and still need more than she can give. You are allowed to see her inner child and still tend to your own.
You didn’t get everything you needed. That’s real. That’s allowed to hurt. And girl, you are still here. Growing, healing, feeling it fully, choosing yourself even when nobody modeled what that looked like.
Nobody in your family did this work before you.
That’s not small. That’s everything.
Let’s Gather:
If this one feels heavy, that’s real.
This isn’t the post you read and feel better immediately. This is the one you sit with. Maybe you close the tab and come back. Maybe you read it twice. Maybe you send it to the group chat, not the family one, the other one. The one with your friends who get it.
Drop a word below. A sentence. A 🤎 if you’re sitting with something you don’t have words for yet.
And if you’ve never said out loud, even to yourself — I just wanted to be mothered —
You can say it here. We’ll hold it with you.
Until the next gathering, rest when you can. Let yourself be held in ways your younger self deserved. Exhale fully.
~Gathering Eldest Daughters