The Grief of Understanding Your Mother
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