It has been eleven years since my mother died.
Eleven years without either of my parents.
And still, some days, it feels as though I am standing in that room again—alone beside her, watching and waiting for the end to come.
The day my mother died was filled with emotions that did not make sense together. Grief sat beside relief. Love beside anger. Sorrow beside exhaustion. There were moments of tenderness tangled together with memories that still hurt. I remember feeling guilty for the ways my heart could not settle on one emotion, as if mourning was supposed to be simple and pure. But it was never simple.
Death does not suddenly untangle a complicated relationship. It does not erase childhood wounds, unanswered questions, or years of longing for things that never fully existed. Instead, all of it arrives together in the same room. The love. The hurt. The hope. The disappointment. The ache for what was, and the ache for what never became.
I remember watching her breathe, wondering which breath would be the last. Time moved strangely in that room. Every second felt heavy. I was no longer just a daughter—I had become the witness to her leaving this world. There is something profoundly lonely about sitting beside death, especially when the relationship itself carried loneliness long before that moment.
I sat there trying to remember a time when she loved me—truly loved me—or wanted me.
And I had none.
No memory came rushing back. No warm moment appeared to soften the silence in my mind. I searched anyway, desperately, as though somewhere inside me there had to be proof that I had once been held gently, wanted fully, loved without condition.
But even with that emptiness sitting inside me, I still wanted my mother.
That is the part people do not always understand. A child does not stop longing for their mother simply because love was inconsistent, absent, painful, or never given in the way it should have been. The ache remains anyway. Deep and instinctive. Almost impossible to explain.
As I sat beside her in those final hours, I remember thinking how strange it was to grieve someone while also grieving what I never had with them. I was mourning her death, but I was also mourning the relationship I spent my whole life hoping would someday become real.
I wanted one memory to hold onto.
One moment where I felt chosen.
One moment where I knew, without question, that I was loved.
But sometimes the hardest truth is realizing that the child inside you kept surviving on hope instead of evidence.
And still, even then, I wanted my mother to reach for me.
I wanted her to say something that could heal the years between us.
I wanted, even at the end, to finally feel like someone’s daughter.
There is a particular kind of heartbreak in realizing that the longing for a mother can survive even when the memories do not.
I still ache for someone to hold me the way I hold my own children.
To wrap their arms around me without hesitation.
To listen without rushing me.
To guide me without conditions, limits, or fear that love might suddenly disappear.
Sometimes I watch the way I comfort my children—the way I pull them close when they are hurting, the way I stop what I am doing to truly hear them—and I realize that somewhere deep inside me is the child who still wonders what it would have felt like to receive that same kind of care.
Not perfection.
Just safety.
Just softness.
Just someone who stayed.
I think the hardest part is that I want to be held just as tightly. I want to feel whatever my children feel when I wrap my arms around them and tell them everything is going to be okay.
And sometimes I wonder—who does that for me?
Yes, I have Ken. My husband. My best friend. The person who has stood beside me through so much. His love is real, steady, and faithful. I am deeply grateful for him.
But the love between a husband and wife is different from the love a mother gives a child.
A spouse walks beside you.
A mother, at least the kind I longed for, is supposed to be the place you fall apart without fear.
There is something so primal about wanting to be mothered. Wanting someone to look at you and see not what you can do for them, not how strong you are, not how capable you have become—but simply see you as someone worth protecting, comforting, and carrying when life becomes too heavy.
I think that is why the ache still lives inside me.
Because I became strong before I was ever held.
Responsible before I was nurtured.
Independent before I ever felt safe enough to depend on anyone.
And even now, as an adult, there are moments when I want to crawl into someone’s arms and rest without guilt. To not be the strong one for once. To not have to explain why I am hurting. To simply be cared for with the same tenderness I try to pour into my own children every day.
My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was the closest thing I will ever know to that kind of love.
And she did love me. I know she did.
But even with her, there was always a line. A limit to how much of herself she could fully give me. Not because she was cruel. Not because she withheld love intentionally. But because before she was ever my grandmother, she was my mother’s mother first.
Her heart was tied to her daughter in a way I could never untangle.
I think one of the deepest pains was watching my grandmother love my mother with the kind of devotion I spent my whole life longing for myself. She protected her. Defended her. Carried compassion for her wounds, her struggles, her pain. And part of me understood that. A mother’s love for her child runs deep.
But I was a child too.
And sometimes it felt as though there was no place for both truths to exist at once—that my mother could be hurting and still hurt me, that my grandmother could love me deeply while never being fully able to step outside her loyalty to her daughter.
So I learned to live within the limits of that love.
I took the comfort she could give. The moments of safety. The glimpses of warmth. I treasured them because they were real. But somewhere inside me, I also understood that there were places my grief could not go with her. Certain truths that sat too close to the pain of her own child.
That kind of loneliness is hard to explain.
To be loved, but not fully held.
To be cared for, but still emotionally orphaned in some quiet way.
To know someone wanted the best for you while also knowing they could never entirely stand on your side without it feeling like a betrayal of someone else they loved first.
And yet, I still carry gratitude for her.
Because even limited love can leave light behind.
Even imperfect love can become a lifeline for a child trying desperately to survive.
But I would be lying if I said it did not ache sometimes—to realize that my grandmother loved her daughter with the kind of fierce, unquestioning love I spent my entire childhood hoping someone would someday give to me.
Sometimes I want to scream from the top of a mountain for someone to help me.
Not because I am falling apart in some dramatic, visible way. Most people would probably say I am doing well. I work. I teach. I parent. I love my family. I keep moving forward.
But underneath all of that is this ache I cannot fully explain.
An exhaustion that does not come from one bad day, but from a lifetime of carrying myself.
And the hardest part is that I am not even sure what I need.
I do not know if I want someone to save me, comfort me, guide me, or simply sit beside me and finally notice how heavy everything has been. Sometimes I think I just want permission to stop being strong for a little while.
Because when you grow up without being emotionally held, you learn how to survive by becoming your own protector, your own comfort, your own caretaker. You become the person everyone else can lean on while quietly wondering where you are supposed to go with your own pain.
So the feelings build in silence.
The grief.
The loneliness.
The longing.
The exhaustion of always being the one who manages, adapts, survives, and keeps going.
And sometimes it rises so suddenly inside me that I feel like screaming into the sky:
“Can someone please help me?”
“Can someone please see me?”
“Can someone please hold the parts of me that have been carrying too much for too long?”
But even then, I do not always know what help would look like.
Because what I ache for is not something that can be neatly fixed.
I ache for the kind of safety that is supposed to begin in childhood.
The kind of love that teaches your nervous system it is okay to rest.
The kind of care that allows a child to believe they do not have to earn tenderness.
And when you grow up without that, part of you keeps searching for it long after childhood ends.
I think that is what people misunderstand about trauma. Survival does not mean the longing disappears. Sometimes surviving only means you learned how to function while carrying an invisible hunger for comfort, protection, and unconditional love.
There are days I envy the ease with which my children collapse into my arms when they are hurt. They do not hesitate. They do not apologize for needing comfort. They trust completely that I will hold them.
I wonder what that must feel like.
To need someone and not fear becoming a burden.
To cry and know someone will come.
To rest without waiting for love to be withdrawn.
Sometimes I think the little girl inside me is still standing somewhere with her arms open, waiting for someone to finally say,
“You do not have to do this alone anymore.”
There are days when it feels like this is not just a wound, but a missing part of who I am.
Not something broken that can simply be repaired, but something that was never fully given to me in the first place.
People often speak about healing as though every pain eventually closes neatly with time, love, or understanding. But some losses are different. Some grief comes not from losing what you had, but from never truly having it at all.
And how do you fully heal from the absence of something your heart needed in order to grow safely?
I do not know if that ache will ever completely disappear.
There is still a part of me that feels unfinished. A quiet emptiness where a mother’s comfort, protection, and unconditional love were supposed to live. Sometimes I think I carry that absence everywhere I go. It follows me into motherhood, into relationships, into the way I question myself, overthink everything, and struggle to believe I am worthy of being cared for without conditions.
It is hard to explain to people who were loved gently as children.
The absence becomes part of your identity.
Part of the way you see the world.
Part of the way your body holds fear, loneliness, and longing.
And maybe the hardest truth is realizing that some wounds do not heal by disappearing. Some wounds heal by learning how to live beside them without letting them consume every part of you.
I do not think the little girl inside me will ever completely stop searching for the mother she needed.
But I also know this:
That missing piece did not stop me from becoming loving.
It did not stop me from becoming gentle.
It did not stop me from becoming the safe place I once searched for in someone else.
Sometimes I look at my children and realize they will never fully understand the depth of what they were given simply by being held, heard, comforted, and loved consistently. And part of me is grateful for that. They should never have to understand that kind of emptiness firsthand.
There are still moments when the grief feels bottomless. Moments when I wonder who I might have become if I had been loved differently from the beginning.
But even in that sorrow, there is something sacred in the fact that I chose not to pass the emptiness forward.
The ache may always live inside me.
The longing may never fully leave.
But so does grace.
So does love.
So does the quiet courage of becoming the kind of mother I once needed myself.
I hold them when they cry.
I listen when they speak.
I apologize when I am wrong.
I stay.
And sometimes, in those quiet moments when my children rest safely against me, I grieve and heal at the same time.
Because somewhere deep inside me is still the little girl who wanted someone to hold her like this too.
