The deeper I get into this work, the more I feel the tension between the mother I’m becoming and the mother I had. It’s strange — loving her, understanding her, seeing her wounds so clearly now… while also refusing to let those wounds shape my children. It’s a kind of love that has boundaries built into it, not out of punishment, but out of protection.
I can hold compassion for the version of her who was doing her best, and still hold firm to the truth that her best wasn’t always safe for me. Both things can be true. Both things are true. And learning to live in that “both” is its own kind of growing up — the kind I’m doing decades later than I should have had to.
And part of what makes all of this so complicated is how present she still is in our lives. She’s our main source of childcare, in and out of the house almost every day, woven into the rhythms we depend on. And I love her, and I’m grateful for the ways she shows up — but it also means the boundaries I’m trying to build aren’t abstract. They’re happening in real time, in shared spaces, with someone who is still finding her own footing. It’s a strange thing, trying to heal from someone while also needing them, loving them, and still protecting your kids from the patterns you’re working so hard to break.
Because the more I heal, the more I see how much she never healed. The more I soften with my kids, the more I notice the places where she hardened. The more I choose presence, the more I recognize the ways she disappeared into her own pain. And none of that is about blame — it’s about clarity. It’s about finally seeing the landscape I grew up in without the fog of survival distorting it.
And with that clarity comes a kind of grief I never expected — grieving the childhood I didn’t get, grieving the mother she couldn’t be, grieving the version of myself that had to grow up too fast. But grief isn’t the enemy here. It’s the doorway. It’s the place where I finally get to tell the truth without fear of what it will break.
And even as I say all of this — even as I name the weight I carried and the things I shouldn’t have had to learn so young — I can also say this: I wouldn’t change who I became because of it. I wouldn’t rewrite the parts of me that were forged in those circumstances. I’m here, doing this work, because I survived things that could have broken me in a hundred different ways.
I know I could have gone down a much darker path than my mother ever did. I know the statistics. I know the patterns. I know the roads that were laid out in front of me. And somehow, I still found my way to this version of myself — the one who refuses to repeat what hurt me, the one who chooses softness even when it feels foreign, the one who is building something better from the scraps of what I was given.
So no, I don’t sit here wishing my life had been different. I sit here acknowledging that it shaped me — and that I’m strong enough to shape something new from it.
And the more I look at the path I’ve taken — the one I’m still taking — the more I realize I’ve been breaking cycles long before I ever had the language for it. Leaving situations that were shrinking me. Questioning patterns that didn’t feel right in my body. Choosing softness even when hardness was all I’d ever known. Every one of those choices was a quiet rebellion, a small act of self‑preservation that led me here.
Motherhood didn’t start my healing — it accelerated it. It held up a mirror I couldn’t look away from. It made me confront the parts of myself I had ignored, avoided, or simply never had the chance to develop. And as uncomfortable as that mirror can be, it’s also the thing that keeps me growing. It’s the thing that keeps me honest. It’s the thing that keeps me choosing the kind of parent I want to be, not the one I was taught to be.
Because every time I choose presence over panic, connection over control, reflection over reaction — I’m not just changing the moment. I’m changing the story. I’m changing the inheritance. I’m changing the future my children will carry in their bones.
And maybe that’s the quiet miracle of all of this: that I get to build something I never had, and in doing so, I get to become someone I never got to be. Not a perfect mother. Not a healed woman. Just a human being who is trying — really trying — to give her children a life that doesn’t require them to recover from it.
And on the nights when we’re all tangled together in one bed — someone upside down, someone insisting they’re “not tired,” someone’s elbow inevitably in my throat — I feel it. The shift. The softness. The safety I’m building in real time. It’s messy and loud and nothing like the bedtime routines I imagined, but it’s ours. And somehow, in the middle of all that chaos, I can feel the cycle breaking.
And in that shift, I can feel the space I’ve carved — the one that didn’t exist for me, but will exist for them.
Leave a comment