I carry it while I run errands. It would be nice to have a mom to call while I’m in the car.

I carry it heavy on holidays. “Everyone” is sharing their moms in their happy pictures on social media. And I have to remind myself it’s a highlight reel. And mine just looks different. And it’s ok that that hurts.

I carry it when my boys do something like starting their first jobs or getting their license or graduating out of speech therapy. I sure wish I had a mom to text those pictures I’m taking, to.

I carry it when one of my boys is sick and I’m unsure if I should take them to the ER. Is that dramatic or is it time? The cough sounds bad. Does it look like he’s retracting to you, mom??

I think a mother wound leaves a permanent scar.

I watch women my age call their mothers. Their moms keep the grandchildren for the afternoon, help throw birthday parties, answer questions, celebrate milestones, and simply do life with them.

When you’ve never had that, and you know you never will, it feels like a grief with no finish line.

There is always another ordinary moment waiting to remind you of what you never had.

A few days ago, I was at a first birthday party.

A grandmother reached over and took the baby out of her daughter’s arms so her daughter could eat a piece of her own child’s birthday cake. That’s all it was. She saw her daughter’s hands were full and she reached. And it was such an ordinary moment. And those are the ones that catch me most off guard.

I carried it at Christmas, standing in a kitchen with three generations of women in it. They were talking about mahjong. Where they got their set, what snacks they all bring and when they’re playing next. Then scrapbooking, the pages they’d finished, the pictures one of them still needed. None of it mattered and that’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about. They have things they do together. I don’t know what that’s like. I will never have that with my mother. So many people have mothers that they do life with.

You look at the people around you…mothers.

You look on social media….mothers.

You look at tv and movies….mothers.

The pain is relentless.

Not because every day is unbearable.

But because the reminders are everywhere.

They aren’t usually anniversaries or songs on the radio.

They’re ordinary moments.

A grandmother taking the baby.

A daughter calling her mom.

A mother showing up.

The kinds of moments most people don’t think twice about.

You can’t avoid them because they’re woven into everyday life.

There is no last reminder.

There is no last time your heart quietly whispers,

“I wish I’d had that.”

So I carry it with me everyday.

Every single day.

On good days, on bad days, on sick days, on vacation days, on ordinary days and even on special occasion days. My grief is always there. My constant companion. And the more I talk about my grief, the less heavy it feels. It feels a little less suffocating. It feels like when you grab your keys and cell phone and sunglasses as you head out the door….I also grab the grief and just bring it along with me instead of acting like it doesn’t exist. And life keeps moving.

It has to.

“Hi, grief.

Yes, I know you’re here.

Yes, I know it hurts.

I’m taking one of the boys to football practice now. You coming?”

Her cruelty did too.

The older she got, the less she seemed to care who she hurt or why.

But her unhappiness was always there.

As far back as I can remember, she was miserable.

Not sad.

Not the kind of miserable that makes people feel compassion and want to help.

The kind of miserable that demands a sacrifice.

The kind that walks into a room and everyone immediately starts adjusting themselves around it.

My mother was always searching for something.

A new identity.

A new belief system.

A new friend to imitate.

A new hobby.

A new version of herself that might finally make her happy.

One year she became deeply religious.

She started wearing a head covering to church and homeschooling my younger brother and me.

I use the word homeschooling loosely.

She bought a curriculum called Far Above Rubies (a reference to a scripture in Proverbs.) One of the books was about cooking and freezing meals for a year for your family.

We never studied those books. They sat unopened.

The only schoolwork I remember doing that year was some math tutoring with a woman from church and my mother making me read a passage in 1 Corinthians about women covering their heads.

Around the same time, she bought a bread maker.

I remember her using it once.

She ordered recordings from Amish families and played them in the car.

For a while, this became our life.

Then it wasn’t.

A year later she was someone else entirely.

Then someone else.

Then someone else.

The details changed, but the pattern never did.

Nothing seemed to satisfy her for long.

Not religion.

Not therapy.

Not horses.

Not marriage.

Not friendship.

Not motherhood.

As a child, I thought maybe the answer was me.

Maybe if I were prettier.

Maybe if I were thinner.

Maybe if I were quieter.

Maybe if I wore the head covering.

Maybe if I were more obedient.

Maybe if I could just become whatever she wanted, she would finally be happy.

What I understand now is that I was trying to solve a problem that had existed long before I was born.

Looking back, the thing I remember most is how hard she searched.

New beliefs.

New identities.

New people.

New answers.

Always searching.

Never finding it.

“But she’s your mother.”

People say it because they cannot conceptualize standing firm and not accepting her behavior.
So they minimize it.
They explain it away.

“Everyone has flaws.”
“You only get one mother.”
“Life is short.”
“You should forgive and forget.”

I’ve heard it all.

And I’m not someone who pushes for no contact.
It’s one of the most painful decisions a person can make.
I avoided it for years. I pushed it off for as long as I could.

The healing part is this:
Some days you grieve.
Some days you feel angry.
Some days you feel like you’ve moved past it.

And the grieving days will catch you off guard.

Because what do you mean
you never got a childhood…
and you will never have a mother to call when you need one?

What do you mean
your birthday will come and go
without the person who brought you into this world acknowledging you?

What do you mean
other adult children have a support system
and you don’t even know what that would feel like?

What do you mean
you have to always be strong,
always be alone,
and still defend your decision
to go no contact with someone who abused you?

Other days, you’ve gotten so used to it
you don’t think about it much at all.

Life is full.
Busy.
Overwhelming in its own ways.

(Overwhelming… because there is no support system.)

There isn’t much space to sit in it.

And if we’re being honest,
society shames you for being no contact.

So it becomes easier
to avoid it.

A full life + avoidance
and you can almost forget.

Almost.

Until you’re standing in a conversation,
listening to someone talk about how proud they are of their children.
Their son getting his master’s.
Another son getting promoted.
Their daughter just had a baby.
And they’re going to stay with her for a few weeks
to help her adjust postpartum.

And there it is.

The anger no one talks about.

Because you’re supposed to smile.
Nod.
Say how wonderful that is.

But what you feel
is something else entirely.

You feel the absence.
The unfairness.
The reality that you never had that kind of safety.

And you never will.

There is no redo.

So this is where you sit…
with grief,
anger,
indifference,
a full life,
and gratitude that you survived it.

All of it, at the same time.

And the question becomes:

What do you do with all of it?

Because society doesn’t make space for this.

Not the abuse.
Not the grief.
Not the complexity.

Only the decision.

The audacity of going no contact.
The shame of not “getting over it.”

If they only knew
how badly you wanted to get over it.

But “it” didn’t stop.

You cannot get over something
that is still happening.

So what they’re really asking is:

“Why can’t you accept that your mother will always treat you poorly
and still be grateful she’s your mother?”

My mind cannot bend that way.

Because nowhere else in life
do we accept ongoing harm
in the name of a role.

If someone in a church was belligerent and disruptive,
they would be asked to leave.

If a student was abusive to a teacher and classmates,
they would be removed from the classroom.

If an employee mistreated others,
they would be fired.

If a tenant was abusive,
they would be asked to vacate.

If a babysitter mistreated your child,
you would end the arrangement immediately.

Even if a pet was being mistreated,
no one would question your decision
to remove them from that care.

So why,
when you are fighting for your life,
when you choose the hardest, most painful path,
when you walk away from a mother
who has made no effort to change…..

why are you the one
who carries the shame?

There are things that hurt you and form you at the same time.
Even if that’s not who you want to be… it’s painfully difficult to leave behind when it’s how you were shaped in your most formative years.

In my formative years, I was taught that looks mattered above all else.
After that, religion.

My family spoke about looks constantly.
My looks. Their looks. Other people’s looks.

I remember sitting in a therapist’s office at 20 years old, away at college, trying to explain why everything felt so hard.

I told her it took me over an hour to get ready.
Then I would leave early for class, giving myself time to park and settle my nerves.

The whole process took two to three hours.

I would finally find a parking spot…
and then sit in my car, trying to will myself to go inside.

My anxiety would take over.
And I would leave.

I failed every single class.
Two semesters in a row.

Not because I didn’t care.
But because I couldn’t make myself walk into a room where I felt so exposed.

I was consumed with how I looked.
If I fit in.
How I was being perceived.
Where I would sit.
If I could hide.
What would happen if I was called on… or had to speak.

So I left.

There was still so much chaos at home.
I was glad to be away. Finally.

This was my second attempt at college.

During my first, right before finals of my first semester, my dad called and told me I had to come home.
My younger brother had been skipping school, and they needed my help.

A year and a half later, I transferred to a college two hours from home.

I was expected to come home every weekend.

My mother had had another affair.
My brother was a senior.
I was trying to help get him through graduation.

I’ve always been hard on myself.
My intellect. My appearance. My hair. My weight.

I was called fat, ugly, and stupid more than I was called by my actual name.

My mother told me to cover my arms because they were too big.
She worried over my hair, telling me it looked like straw.

When you grow up knowing you don’t meet the standard of beauty in your own home…
it does something to you.

It made me anxious.
It made me afraid of being seen.

In junior high and high school, my family called me “the recluse.”

If my family was going out, I would ask to stay home.
Being in public felt unbearable.

It wasn’t just emotional.
It was physical.

Stomach pain.
Headaches so severe I had a CT scan at 14 years old.

While we waited for the results, I prayed they would find something.
That I would go to sleep… and not wake up.

I just wanted it to be over.

Later, I saw a psychiatrist for social anxiety as everything in my life felt like it was unraveling.

My best friend died suddenly in his sleep, eight days after his 21st birthday.
I had failed two full semesters of college.
I was in my first relationship….one filled with abuse and betrayal that only confirmed everything I already believed about myself.

My family was still chaotic.
Still unstable.

It felt like my life was never going to begin.

Like I was stuck,
in my childhood home in my mind,
and in my college apartment in real life.

I don’t even know that girl anymore.

The last traces of her show up in quieter ways now.

In the way I still hate my body.
In the way I still step on the scale every single morning… and every single night.

For years, on my children’s birthdays, they would ask me to eat cake with them.

And I would say no.

I regret that more than I can put into words.

Now, I always eat the cake.

And I carry the guilt quietly, inside myself, where they can’t see it.

I don’t talk about diets in front of them.
I don’t want them to inherit what I was given.

But I still feel it.

I am still working on the voice in my head.
Still learning how to speak to myself with something softer than criticism.

Sometimes I wonder how old I will be
when I stop weighing my body
and my words so carefully,

for fear of being all the things
I was told I was growing up.

And maybe that’s where I am now.

Not fully free.
But aware.

Not healed all at once.
But choosing, little by little,
to not pass this down.

Maybe healing, for me, looks like this….letting it end with me, even if it takes a lifetime.

It’s a thought that keeps coming back to me as I move through my own healing, and as I listen to the stories so many of you share with me.

If a teacher stands in front of a classroom and teaches you something, you trust that it’s correct. You don’t question it. You learn it as fact.

And if that teacher is teaching you everything incorrectly, you don’t know that either.

You study it. You memorize it. You build your understanding on it.

Because you trust them.

That’s what happens with a mother.

She is the first person who teaches you who you are. And whatever she teaches you, whether it’s accurate or not, becomes the foundation you build your life on.

If you were taught you were fat,
ugly,
unlikable…
not athletic enough,
annoying,
too loud…
uninteresting,
not smart,
not beautiful enough…

just not what she wanted.

You don’t hear that as opinion.

You take it on as truth.

It doesn’t feel like something someone said to you.

It feels like something you are.

You were taught incorrect information about yourself.

Your entire foundation was built on something that wasn’t true.

So of course things have felt harder.

So of course you have felt behind.

You were trying to build a life on something that was never accurate to begin with.

It’s like studying for a test using the wrong material.

You can try as hard as you want. You can prepare, show up, do everything right.

And still fail.

Not because you’re incapable.

But because what you were given to learn from was incorrect.

At some point, you start to realize something doesn’t add up.

You’re doing everything you’re supposed to do, and it’s still not working.

That’s when the question starts to surface:

What if the problem isn’t you?

What if the problem is what you were taught about yourself?

And then comes the part no one prepares you for.

You have to go back and unlearn it.

In the middle of your life.

While you’re working.
Raising children.
Trying to hold everything together.

You don’t get to pause everything and start over.

You have to relearn yourself while still living.

You’re not failing.
You were given the wrong answers.

I spent the day after Christmas in a home that was full of things I don’t have.
Not just decorations or heirlooms or family recipes.
But something deeper.
A sense of being held by generations.

There were framed photographs on the walls.
Handwritten recipes in the kitchen.
Holiday dishes that had been passed down.
Scrapbooks of a life that had been documented and cherished.

It was the kind of home where history lived quietly in the corners.
Not loud. Not showy. Just… there.
Like it had always been there.

A mother who adored her daughter. A daughter who felt safe and seen. A daughter-in-law who was welcomed and loved.

And there I was.

A woman who learned how to cook from Instagram.
A woman with blank walls.
A woman without heirlooms.
A woman without a village.

Sometimes I watch creators on Instagram who talk about learning to cook in their mama’s kitchen, growing up.
They talk about learning at her side, stirring pots, being handed down flavors and stories and love.
I watch those videos and I feel two things at once.

Joy.
And something that aches so deeply I almost have to look away.

Because what a gift it must be to be taught.
To be passed something.
To be remembered before you ever had to remember yourself.

I sat in that beautiful, warm house and felt something twist inside of me that I didn’t know how to name.

It wasn’t envy.

It was the quiet, aching realization that some women are born into a web of support, memory, and belonging… and some of us have had to build everything from scratch with shaking hands.

I wasn’t just noticing her décor.
I was noticing her roots.

She knew who she was because generations had told her.
She could relax into hobbies and joy because someone else was holding her babies.
She could rest because she had a village.

And I realized something that broke my heart open:

I have spent my life trying to become the kind of woman who grows in well-watered soil…
when I was raised in drought.

I felt inferior that day.
Not because I am less capable.
But because I was never given what she was.

No one taught me family recipes.
No one passed me down dishes or traditions.
No one held my children so I could scrapbook or breathe.

I learned how to survive, not how to be cherished.

I taught myself how to cook.
How to mother.
How to be a woman.
How to build a life.

But I never had anyone standing behind me saying, “This is how we do it. You belong here.”

And that grief is quiet and invisible.

But it lives in moments like that.
Standing in someone else’s lineage…
and realizing you are still planting yours alone.

If you’ve ever walked into a room full of family history and felt like a visitor in your own life, please know:

You are not broken.
You were just never rooted.
And some of us are still learning how to grow without a garden.

It strips innocence away.
It forces you to grow up far faster than you should have.
It asks you to carry adult things with a child’s body and a child’s nervous system.

While other children are learning how to play, you are learning how to manage.
While your peers are worried about being kids, you are worried about adults.

Marriage problems.
Money stress.
Loneliness.
Sexual dissatisfaction.
Unhappiness that has nowhere to go.

You carry things your peers don’t carry and cannot relate to.
So you feel older. Separate. Out of place.
That isn’t maturity.
It’s trauma.
It’s forced adulthood.

And it doesn’t stay in childhood.

It follows you.

When you grow up fixing your parents, your sense of worth grows on

very shaky ground.

You learn a kind of math very early:

If I can fix their marriage, I can make life better for the whole family.
If life is better, I am valuable.
If I am valuable, I can be loved.

If money is tight, then it must be because of me.
I need to need less.
Less clothes.
Less shoes.
Less space.
Less growing.

If I can help with their friendships…:watch the kids, make it easier….then they can relax.
Then I did my part.

If I help around the house or raise my siblings, maybe my parents can have alone time.
Maybe my mother won’t be so unhappy.

If I eat less, my body won’t upset her.
So I restrict.

If I don’t talk about the bully at school, or the brother who abuses me every day after school, then I won’t cause problems.
Then I won’t be yelled at.
Then I won’t be told I’m always the problem.

If I were better.
Prettier.
Smarter.
More interesting.
Thinner.
Easier.
If I needed less and helped more,

Then they would be happier.
I would be useful.
I could fix everything.

Those were my beliefs as a child.

I was the fixer.
I was the listener.

I’ve been listening to my parents’ problems like a caretaker since I was nine years old.

I was the emotional and physical punching bag for my older brother.
The protector of my younger brother.
Eventually, I became an interventionist for him.

My younger brother would later develop a serious drug addiction. One that began after my narcissistic mother introduced him to pain pills as a teenager.
My older brother moved repeatedly, changed colleges and apartments, and I was expected to pack and unpack him. Over and over again.

My younger brother’s addiction took a devastating turn in 2020.
In 2022, he was sentenced to a significant amount of time in prison.

I had never known anyone in prison before.
Now it was my brother.

I keep saying each year is the hardest year I’ve ever lived.
And then another one comes.

The years from 2024 to 2025 were brutal.

My parents were going through a continuous, disorienting divorce after more than fifty years of marriage.
My mother (true to her lifelong patterns) created her own version of events. Lies. Flying monkeys. Vengeful storytelling.

Friends took sides.

Our family split into sides.

The truth was simpler and harder: she has been deeply unhappy her entire life.

My father needed so much from me during that time.
He didn’t realize how much it cost me.
But this had always been my role.
He was used to relying on me.

At the same time, my children were getting older and needed more from me.
My youngest was showing delays that we would later understand as early signs of autism.

I needed to be mother.
Wife.
Daughter.
Sister.

And somewhere inside all of that, a person.

When my parents separated, I was finally “allowed” to be no contact with my mother.
I was trying to be there for my brother in prison.
Trying to process my own grief.
Driving six hours round trip every six weeks to visit him.

One year to the month, after my parents separated, they reconciled.

The pressure placed on me to reconcile with my mother too was unbearable.

There were stretches where my father gave me the most profound silent treatment I’ve ever experienced.

Seven months later, they separated again.

And one week ago, my parents officially divorced after fifty-two years of marriage.
They are seventy-two and seventy years old.

It has been deeply disorienting.

It is final.

And now, once again, I feel like my father’s most official caretaker.

This is what emotional enmeshment looks like when it doesn’t end.

It looks like a child who learned early that being needed was the same as being loved.
It looks like an adult who is still carrying roles that were never meant to be theirs.
It looks like exhaustion that feels familiar instead of alarming.

I am still unlearning the belief that love must be earned through fixing.
I am still learning that rest does not mean abandonment.

This is not something I outgrew.

It took adulthood to understand how much this cost me.

Even now, in adulthood, it feels like I’m expected to be a daughter and sister first, and then I get to be a wife and mother. Forget existing as a person. My primary role has always been “daughter.” Support person. Confidant. Moral support. Cause fighter when needed. Morale booster. Listener. Problem solver.

I feel guilty even writing this.
I’m not supposed to acknowledge these duties, certainly not poorly. I’m just supposed to do them.

As a child, I knew things no child should ever know.
I knew when my mother had affairs.
I knew when men complimented her.
I knew when my parents fought.
I knew that my mother was unhappy. That she regretted marrying young, having children young, and missing out on a college experience.
I knew that she despised my paternal grandmother, who was actually a gentle, precious woman.
I even knew that she was dissatisfied with my father’s performance in the bedroom.

When I think of what I carried as a little girl, I feel revolted.
Each afternoon after school, I cleaned the entire house, starting with my parents’ bedroom and bathroom, then the common areas. I’d finish my homework, help make supper, and clean the kitchen afterward.
Part of my chores included picking up my mother’s lingerie. I still remember the unease in my body doing that. It wasn’t just physical labor, it was emotional labor. It was being entangled in adult lives I never asked to know.

When my mother left (and she left often) I was expected to step in as the fill-in wife and mother. My father leaned on me for emotional support during their separations. I became his comforter, his sounding board.

When I was nineteen, days away from moving out of state for college, my parents separated again. My dad told me I couldn’t leave my younger brother without a mother.
I had already quit my daycare job and said goodbye to everyone, proud and ready for the new life ahead.
Instead, I called my boss and asked for my job back. I told people my financial aid had fallen through and that I’d be attending the local community college instead. The truth was harder to say: my mother left again, and I had to stay home to take care of everyone.

My college roommate-to-be, found someone new. They became best friends and stood in each other’s weddings. I stayed behind, caring for my dad, my brother, and my alcoholic cousin who lived on our family’s small hobby farm. My parents eventually reconciled, as they always did.
I hung maps of New York City on my bedroom wall and dreamed of running away.

The next year, I finally left for college, just two hours away this time. But before I could even move in, my older sibling told my parents he’d be transferring to my school and moving into my apartment.
Then my best friend died suddenly. His parents, still in close contact with mine, worried about his sister, and soon she was moved into my apartment too.

It was as if the world kept reinforcing the same message: You are here to take care of everyone.

So I did. I took care of my brother. I took care of my best friend’s grieving sister. I took care of my father’s emotions, my mother’s secrets, and everyone else’s pain.

No one ever took care of mine.

When I finally lived alone the following year, I entered my first serious relationship, complete with sexual assault, physical abuse, and betrayal. I didn’t even realize that being treated well was something I was supposed to expect.
It was too foreign.

Because love, for me, had always meant carrying weight that wasn’t mine.

I think about that little girl often, the one folding her mother’s lingerie, wiping the counters, and trying to make everyone happy. She was so small and so loyal. I wish I could tell her she didn’t have to earn her place in the family by saving everyone else.

She deserved to have her heart held, not handed the weight of everyone else’s.
And now, as a grown woman, I’m trying so hard to learn to set that weight down.

.

My mother’s relationship with my grandmother was fractured. My grandmother’s sisters were cruel to each other, and to my sweet great-grandmother. On my father’s side, his sister was unkind to my paternal grandmother. Everywhere I looked, I saw the same thread repeating: women bound by blood but not by kindness.

And over time I absorbed it as a universal truth: That’s just how it is with mothers and daughters.

When I became a mother myself, I carried that belief like a warning.
I only have sons, and if I’m honest, I felt a quiet relief each time. I told myself I was glad not to have a daughter. I was afraid of repeating the cycle, afraid of failing her, afraid of finding myself on the other side of that same story.

It felt safer to raise boys, where that particular fracture couldn’t follow me.

But recently, something unexpected happened.
I found out I was pregnant.

And it felt like just as I was adjusting to this very unexpected surprise, almost out of my first trimester, I learned I was losing the pregnancy.

On the way home from the emergency room, my doctor’s office called. They didn’t yet know what had happened and asked if I wanted to know the baby’s gender from earlier lab results.

I said yes.
And they told me: It’s a girl.

I could barely whisper thank you through my tears.

I lost the only daughter I have ever known I was carrying.

It once felt safer to raise boys, but in that moment, all I wanted was her.

Since that day, the old family script has been pressing on me: “Mothers and daughters don’t get along.”

But when I think of her, I don’t imagine conflict.
I don’t imagine dysfunction.
I imagine love.

I imagine naming her after my grandmother. I imagine the softness she might have brought into my life.
I had a feeling she was a girl all along.

I imagine what it would have been like to raise a daughter free from the cycles I had inherited and to prove that story wrong.

The truth is, this “age-old belief” is not a truth at all.

It is generational gaslighting.

It implies that mother and daughter were “equally responsible for the tension, as if a child and a parent could ever carry the same weight.”

It blurs abuse, neglect, and cruelty into something called “normal conflict.”
It leaves daughters believing: “If things are bad, it must be half my fault. This must be how it is for everyone, so I shouldn’t complain.”

But this was a lie.

Daughters were never equally responsible.
We were children, caught in a dynamic we didn’t create.

And the truth is, mothers and daughters are not doomed to fracture. Healthy relationships do exist. They can be tender, safe, and whole.

I may never know what it would have been like to raise my daughter, but I know this: I would not have repeated the story.
I would have chosen something different.
I would have raised her in love and adoration.

She left me with the most powerful lesson…that love between a mother and daughter was always possible.

I’m home with my brothers.
We lovingly play and laugh together.

My dad comes home from work and greets everyone happily.
We all run to say hi and give him a hug and ask how his day was.

My mom is making supper in the kitchen.
No pots are slamming. No one is screaming. No doors are slamming.

I walk into my teenage years with two built-in best friends in my brothers.

I don’t struggle with my weight because I grew up with healthy foods and gentle care.
We go for walks as a family.
I don’t learn to numb the pain with food.

Because I’m not an overweight teenager, high school is kind to me.
I have friends. I feel loved at home.
There is laughter in my world.
Pain isn’t something I know from a tender age.

When I leave home for college, I don’t run to the arms of a man who sexually assaults me.
I don’t lose my virginity in the most brutal way.
I meet a boy my age on campus instead of a man 11 years older than me.

I never know what it’s like to be in an abusive relationship because I was taught love.
And I was taught that hitting is not love.

In this life I imagine, I choose safe people.
I know my worth.
I don’t shrink to fit inside someone else’s comfort.
I speak without fear of punishment.

In this life, I am free.

My younger brother never turns to drugs to numb his pain from the abuse.
He grows up to be an attorney.
He has a wife and three children.
He never knows what the inside of a prison looks like.

I never know what it’s like to visit him there.

I get married to a man who loves me and who my dad and brothers tell,
lovingly but firmly, that he better protect me.
We have a beautiful wedding.
My dad gives me away.
We are surrounded by family and friends.
We honeymoon in Greece.

We come home and build a life together.
A life made of laughter and trust.

When he says “I love you,”
I’m able to say “I love you too,” easily,
without any ghosts in the room.
I don’t flinch.
I don’t hesitate.
I don’t brace for the aftermath.

None of the images of violence or betrayal haunt me,
because they never happened.

I don’t have trust issues
because no one I dated ever cheated on me.
Because they all knew I had high self-worth,
and that I would never tolerate such a violation.

I have friends from middle school.
Friends from high school.
Friends from college.
We stayed close.

I have mom-friends now, too.
We go out for girls' nights.
We laugh.
We feel light.

I know what it’s like to love and be loved.
I know what it’s like to cherish friendships and be cherished in them.

The only thing I’m missing in this version of life…
is that I’ll never have the ability to sit with people in their pain.

Because I’ve never known it.

When someone tells me something sad,
I shift in my seat and look away.
I say “I’m so sorry,”
but later I avoid their calls.

It’s not personal, I just don’t have time.
I have a beach trip to plan.
A girls’ night to prep for.
Coffee runs.
Baseball practice.
Target finds.
Dinner plans.
Vacations.

I like pleasant things.
I don’t like uncomfortable conversations.

I see that same sad friend at a school event
and smile politely.
“How are you?”
“Okay. You?”
“Great! Let’s plan a playdate!”
I never text to follow up.

Because if I do, they might bring up the sadness again.
And I don’t know how to hold it.

So life is good.
I can’t sit in other people’s pain, but life is good.

…

On second thought,
maybe there’s one thing I’d change.

I’d still want to save my little brother from addiction.
I’d still want to spare him the darkness.

But as for me?

I kind of like that I can sit with people in their sadness.
I kind of like that it doesn’t scare me.
That I don’t flinch.
That people know they can bring me their deepest sorrow and I’ll stay.

Maybe that came at a high cost.
Maybe I would’ve traded it to protect the child I was.

But I’m here now.
And I know how to sit with sorrow.
I know how to hold a friend who’s breaking.

If I could, I’d rewrite it all. I’d give the child in me the safety she deserved. But since I can’t, I’ll keep this part, the part that can sit in the dark with you and not look away. And maybe you have a piece like that too, something you’d keep, even if it came at too high a cost.

There were nights I begged God to just let me go to Heaven in my sleep.
I didn’t want to wake up and keep being someone who was born “wrong”
with the wrong hair, the wrong face, the wrong body, the wrong brain.
The physical abuse only deepened the shame.
I never questioned why someone would hit me,
I only wondered what I had done to deserve it.
What was wrong with me?

That became the voice in my head.
It told me I was hard to love.
It told me I was someone people couldn’t even tolerate.
It told me I should disappear.

By 14, I didn’t want to leave the house.

We lived in a rural area, and one of my few escapes was watching figure skating,
not on our TV, but on tapes my grandmother would mail me.
I had a tiny TV with a built-in VCR, and I’d hide away in my room and pretend I was as graceful and beautiful as those skaters.
I later learned, in therapy, this was a trauma defense mechanism.

By 16, I couldn’t talk to anyone my age.
My family started calling me “the recluse.”
We moved and when I transferred schools, I spent 8 silent, agonizing weeks not speaking to anyone.
Not because I was just shy
but because social interactions terrified me.
I believed I was fat, ugly, stupid, and disappointing.
Because that’s what I had always been told.

Eventually, college gave me a glimpse of something different.
A friend took me to a makeup counter and a gym.
For a moment, I had a little voice and some laughter and hope.

But then I was told I had to come home after one semester.
I had to help with my brother.
And I disappeared again, this time into myself.
I begged God again. Just let me go to sleep and wake up in Heaven.

I’ve changed cities, schools, and majors, six colleges, three changes, no degree (yet).
I’m still working toward it while I mother.

And still…
to this day…
I question every interaction.

Did I sound stupid?
Did I look weird?
Did I embarrass myself?

That voice, the one that narrates my worthlessness…..
isn’t me.
It’s what I was given.
What was programmed into me.
And it stayed.

If you’ve ever doubted your voice,
if you tear yourself apart after social interactions, or catch your reflection and flinch,
if you feel like your worth changes based on how others respond to you…..
please hear me:

That voice in your head is not you.
It’s the echo of a broken parent who could not give what they never had.

Now you feel broken.
But you’re not.

You just feel broken because someone handed you shame instead of love.
They spoke cruelty into your developing mind and called it parenting.
You were a child. You were looking for warmth, encouragement, safety.
And instead, you were taught to apologize for existing.

That’s not your fault.
But healing is your right.

The fact that you’re only repeating the cruelty on yourself means something inside you never wanted to be cruel to anyone else.
That means you are not broken.

We just have to fix the voice in your head.
We just have to speak a new language, one full of gentleness and kindness and truth.

And friend, I will help you.
This little community we’re building, especially over on Instagram, will help you too.
If you stay a while, we’ll start rewriting that voice in your head together.
Bit by bit.
With love.

Triangulation is defined as the division of a family into triangles. One person acts as the go-between, passing information and shaping how the others relate to each other.

In healthy families, parents may share certain things with their children to guide or nurture them. In toxic families, triangulation is not nurturing. It is a tool of control. It is used to divide, destabilize, and ensure that no relationship feels secure.

I grew up inside a web of this. My mother, who was deeply narcissistic, orchestrated it constantly. It was not casual gossip. It was weaponized.

She would share private conversations she had with my dad, telling us what he “really” thought about us.
She said “your dad thinks you act weird in public.”
She said “your brother thinks that dress you wear all the time is so unflattering.”

Words like these were never offered with love or purpose. They were designed to sting, to make me question my worth, and to drive wedges between me and the people I loved.

It was not just between me and my father or me and my brother. When I became close to my sister-in-law, my mother could not stand it. She began taking her to dinner and pressing her for details about my life. At that time, I was drinking heavily to numb anxiety and the leftover pain of growing up in chaos. My family believed drinking was sinful and unacceptable, so my mother made sure my father found out.

He was furious. There was no conversation, no attempt to understand, no one asking if I felt safe or if I wanted help. Only anger, silence, and distance.

During that same time, my grandmother was dying. She was one of my most cherished people in my life. I called my mother asking to visit and say goodbye. She told me I could not come because my father was still angry. She told my father that I was the one who was too angry to visit. I never got to see my grandmother again before she passed. I stood beside my father at her funeral, apologizing for my choices, apologizing for a rift I never even created.

This is what triangulation looks like in practice:

• Sharing one person’s words about another while demanding secrecy.

• Turning every relationship into a competition.

• Using guilt and fear to discourage open communication.

• Controlling when and how family members can reconnect.

It creates chaos that the narcissistic parent can control. It keeps everyone divided and dependent.

For years, I thought there was something wrong with me for struggling to trust anyone, even outside my family. Now I understand I was raised in a constant state of emotional instability, where closeness was a liability.

If this feels familiar, please know you are not alone. You are not broken for struggling to trust or to build lasting relationships. You were wired to survive a war zone that was disguised as a family.

Naming it is part of the healing. Grieving it is another. And slowly, with time, it is possible to stop playing the game and choose peace, even if that means stepping outside of the triangle entirely.

Triangulation leaves scars, but it also reveals what we deserve. We learn to value honesty, to nurture steadiness, and to give ourselves the kind of trust we never had. And that is where the repair begins.

A couple of months ago, my dad brought me a letter from my mother. A “non-apology.” She never admitted to the lies she spread about me or the damage she caused. She only wrote that she “might have been mistaken about some things” she said during the divorce. That was it. That was her version of amends.

For reasons I still cannot make sense of, I became the center of her ire during that year. She even told people that I was the reason for their divorce, because I have always been jealous of their marriage. The ick I feel even writing those words is hard to explain.

Now my parents are back together.

The same parents who, during that divorce, watched her annihilate my character to anyone who would listen.

She spread lies about me that reached family friends, acquaintances, even strangers. People messaged me, saying they could not believe the things she was telling them. My social anxiety, already fragile, was pushed to the brink. I felt humiliated, shaky, and constantly braced for the next blow. It was as though the world could see me through her warped lens, and the shame was unbearable.

These days, my dad will visit our home or meet us in town, and I treasure that time with him. But recently, he called and said something that made my stomach drop.

He is beginning to dread the holidays.

Beginning to? I dread them. I have for years. Inside, I could go the rest of my life without celebrating another holiday, aside from my children’s birthdays, and never feel like I missed a thing. I get through the holidays for my kids, but for me, they are a storm of old wounds and survival mode.

My dad asked me why we cannot just “go out to eat sometimes as a family” and “just ignore her” but let her come.

In his mind, this is the perfect compromise. It appeases her, allows him to hold the family together in appearance, and he believes the ignoring will let me feel as though I am keeping my no-contact boundary intact.

But it doesn’t. It feels like a betrayal of the boundary I fought so hard to build. It feels like being asked to twist myself back into the shape that keeps everyone else comfortable, even though that shape nearly destroyed me before.

He told me it would make his life so much easier.

And maybe it would. But what about mine?

Every part of me knows that saying yes would be like reopening wounds I have spent years trying to close. Yet there is this ache, this pull, to make things easier for him because I do love him. I hate watching him suffer, even when part of that suffering is the consequence of the person he has chosen to reconcile with.

This is the tug-of-war I live with: wanting to protect my peace, while also wanting to protect my dad’s heart. Knowing that keeping my boundary will make him feel caught in the middle. Knowing that breaking it will make me feel like I am back in the cage I fought to escape.

The holidays are coming, and with them, this impossible balancing act.

For some, this season means warmth, celebration, and family togetherness. For others of us, it means surviving the ghosts of family dynamics we worked so hard to escape. It means remembering, yet again, that sometimes keeping the peace costs too much.

And if you find yourself in that place too, holding your breath as the season approaches and trying to honor your own healing while the world around you keeps asking for more, I want you to know you are not alone. I know it feels strange to even be talking about the holidays in July, but for some of us, the dread begins long before the first decoration appears. There is nothing wrong with protecting your peace, even when it feels like everyone else wishes you would just bend. You are allowed to choose yourself, and your heart, this season

I can’t seem to make friends. Not real ones.

I have acquaintances. I meet people at my kids’ activities. I talk to other moms at the park or in passing. But I don’t have a single person I would call in the middle of the night. I don’t have someone who knows my inner world, my fears, my hopes, the details of my life.

I used to.

I had a best friend of seventeen years. She unfriended me without a word after my brother was sentenced to prison. One day, she was there. The next, gone.

The wound of that rejection is still sharp. It made me feel so disposable. Like all the years of shared memories, all the laughter and late-night phone calls, were a lie.

If I’m honest, the signs were always there. Even when we were younger, people would pull me aside after we had been out with a group and quietly say, She is not a good friend to you. She talks about you. She resents the attention you get.

I knew it on some level, but when you grow up in trauma, when you have been abused, belittled, and taught that love must be earned, you start to believe subpar treatment is the best you can hope for. You tell yourself anything is better than nothing.

After she left, I found myself building connections the only way I knew how: through convenience. My kids had friends, so I became friends with their mothers. We were tethered by proximity, not by any deep understanding of each other.

Even those relationships became complicated. One mom would get jealous if I spent time with another, or if we took our children to the park on a day when hers were in preschool. I found myself slipping back into an old role of walking on eggshells, monitoring my words, making sure no one’s ego was bruised.

Just like with my mom.

I could not say no. I could not be myself. I pushed myself into social situations that drained me, into dynamics that felt so far from who I am.

And eventually, I stopped.

I stopped trying to force friendships. I stopped showing up for the mom nights out. I stopped bending myself into someone palatable just to be included.

Now, I am left here, without friends, but also without the constant weight of pretending.

I tell myself it is temporary. That maybe there are people out there who will meet me where I am, who will not require me to shrink or tiptoe or prove my worth to earn a seat beside them.

But most days, I do not feel like looking for them.

I do not want pity, but I do wonder if others who grew up in chaos and heartbreak feel this too.

How do you carry the weight of a brother in prison, a mother you have cut off, and years of trauma, and still find space to laugh over appetizers on a Friday night?

Maybe some of us cannot. Maybe some of us are not supposed to force it.

If you have felt this way too, I would like to hear. Even if we do not have a table full of best friends, maybe we can at least sit beside each other here.

You’d think I would feel only relief when the panic quiets. But for so long, I worried about everything. I mean everything.

My family of origin used to say I was going to make my children turn out just like me. Anxious. Fragile. Hyper alert.

I told my therapist that once, expecting him to tell me to get it under control. But instead he looked at me and said,
“Good. I hope they turn out exactly like you.”

I couldn’t believe it. For the first time, someone wasn’t treating my anxiety as a flaw to be fixed, but as something that made sense. Something that could be met with compassion.

Because I had sat with anxiety for so long, I thought I was broken.

It started in my teens, with this strange fear that floors would collapse beneath me. My therapist later said maybe that fear was symbolic of the chaos in my childhood, the constant upheaval, the way the ground never felt steady beneath my feet. Maybe it wasn’t really about floors. Maybe it was about the foundation never being safe.

I don’t know for sure. I just know it felt real.

And then I had children. The fear stayed, but it shifted. I started to fear that something tragic would happen to me. That I would get cancer or die in some sudden way and not be here to raise my babies.

I started going to walk-in clinics and ERs just to make sure I wasn’t dying. My arm would go numb. My heart would race. My chest would hurt. I was certain it was something real.

It often was panic. But not always.

During my second pregnancy, I told my nurse I had a strange pain in my stomach and back, sometimes between my shoulder blades. She brushed it off.
“You’re pregnant. Of course your back and stomach hurt.”

Six weeks postpartum, the pain was still there.
She told me my body was still adjusting.

The pain didn’t go away.

Nine months later, in the middle of the night, I went to the ER. I told the doctor I was scared it was cancer. Both of my grandparents had died of it. He said it was anxiety and they didn’t have imaging staff available at that hour. I left feeling ashamed and exhausted.

A few hours later, I went to a different ER.

They told me I needed emergency gallbladder surgery.

I had been dismissed for eighteen months because of how I “sounded.” Because anxiety had become part of my chart.

That’s what anxiety does. It makes other people stop listening. Sometimes it even makes us stop listening to ourselves.

I have lived through so many fears. My health. My children’s health. Floors collapsing. Natural disasters. Car accidents. Fireworks accidents. Drowning. Tires blowing out on the highway. Even extreme summer heat made me afraid.

It was exhausting.

So I started making small changes. I began walking. I cut out coffee. I started making small changes. I started noticing what helped.

One choice at a time, things began to shift.

At some point this year, I realized I hadn’t had a panic attack in months. I realized fear wasn’t making all my decisions for me anymore. Somehow, without a single dramatic moment, I had gained the upper hand.

I still feel anxiety sometimes. But I don’t live inside it anymore.

That feels like everything.

So I made a list. I wrote down all the tools and practices that helped me start to feel safe again. At first, it was just for me in case I settled back into old, familiar patterns.

Then I shared it with a friend. She said it felt like a lifeline.

It has been a lifeline for me too.

If anxiety has woven itself into your bones and convinced you that this is just how you’ll always feel, I hope my story helps you believe something else is possible.

You are not broken. You are not alone.
And healing doesn’t have to be sudden.
Sometimes it begins with the smallest shift.

That’s how it began. My very first memory is also the first time I loved someone with my whole heart.

He was my favorite person in the world. My little brother.

We were close our whole lives. He got married first, to a girl who had become my best friend. He wanted the two of us to be close because he and I had always been close. We were bonded not just by love, but by survival.

We lived through trauma together. Abuse from a family member. I was also abused by our narcissistic mother. He wasn’t, because he was her favorite. And I never resented him for it. Because honestly, he was always my favorite too.

We were both physically and emotionally abused. Those wounds remain for us both to this day.

More days than not, we were bruised and shaken while our parents were at work. But when they got home, we’d escape to the woods behind our house. That was our sanctuary. We played, read comic books, and laughed. Somehow, we laughed when we could, even through all that pain. There was a creek we’d walk to and stay at until dark. Sometimes he’d go play at a neighbor’s house, and I’d walk him there, then go sit at the creek alone until it was time to walk him back.

Later, we lived together in an apartment during college. I’m so glad I have those memories now.

After two years, he transferred schools and got married. A few nights before the wedding, he left me a letter, worried I might feel left behind. He told me we’d always be close. I still have that letter.

But things changed.

That marriage ended. Not because of anything between the two of them, but because our mother couldn’t stand the idea of not being the center of his world. She began sharing her pain pills with him. His wife found him with a gun in his mouth and saved his life one day. He went to a mental health facility. But the spiral had begun, and none of us knew just how far it would go.

The addiction took hold. He spent more and more time with our mother. They started going to the same pain clinic, and he was prescribed the highest dose of OxyContin. That was the beginning of the end of who he used to be.

Ten years passed in a fog of secrecy, shame, and devastation. When the clinic stopped prescribing that horrible drug, they moved on to heroin. I say they because she followed him there too.

Five more years of chaos. Overdoses. Rehabs. Holidays full of grief. ICU visits. Fights. Lies. I lost pieces of him in waves.

But when he’d go to rehab, he’d lean on me again. And I’d show up, every time. I believed I could help him find his way back. I held onto hope like it was the only thing keeping me upright.

Now, my brother is in prison. He’s been there for over three years. And still, it hasn’t gotten easier.

The holidays are different now. I have children of my own, and I do everything I can to make the holidays magical for them. But there’s always a piece of me missing. A part of my soul that feels locked away with him.

Before he left, I told him I didn’t know if I could survive him being somewhere I couldn’t protect him. He told me:

“Don’t lock your soul up in there with me. Go on and live your life to the fullest. Be happy with your children.”

But the truth is, I don’t know how to do that.

I walk in such a strange space each day, where grief and happiness coexist. I laugh with my children, feel joy in their presence, and truly love this life we’ve built. But then a memory or a thought of him will surface. The pain of his everyday life comes rushing in, and the grief floods back again. It never really leaves. It just waits.

Because we survived so much together. Because he is my beloved brother.

And whether I want it to be or not,
part of my soul is in there.

Thank you for reading. If parts of this feel familiar to your own story, I hope it brought you comfort, not isolation. I would be honored to hear from you, if or when you ever feel ready to share.

You weren’t hit.
They never “meant to hurt you.”
Or maybe they did but then they told you it was your fault.

The truth is, it was that bad. And it wasn’t your fault.

They said: "You’re too sensitive."
What it meant: They didn’t want to be held accountable for hurting you.

They said: "You always make everything about you."
What it meant: They couldn’t stand not being the center. Your pain threatened their control.

They said:
"Why can’t you just let it go?"

What it meant:
They want you to stop bringing up their harmful behavior so they don’t have to feel guilty or be held accountable.

They said:
"You’re always looking for something to be upset about."

What it meant:
They refuse to see the real pain they caused. If you have feelings, they want to make it your flaw and certainly not their responsibility.

They said:
"That’s not what happened."

What it meant:
They’re rewriting the story so they don’t have to face what they did. That’s gaslighting and it’s emotional abuse.

They said:
"You need to forgive and move on."

What it meant:
They want the benefits of forgiveness without doing the work of repair. They confuse forgiveness with silence and compliance.

They said:
"You just want to make me look like the bad guy."

What it meant:
They feel exposed when you speak the truth. Your honesty threatens the version of themselves they’ve worked hard to control.

They said:
"I did the best I could."

What it meant:
They want to shut down the conversation. There’s no space for your pain if it makes them feel uncomfortable or “bad.”

They said:
"Other people have it so much worse."

What it meant:
They want to minimize your pain so they don’t have to take it seriously. Comparison is a tool to dismiss your reality.

If you heard these things, I want you to know something that may take years to believe:
You were not the problem.
You were not imagining it.
You were being manipulated.

And the fact that you’re here now, reading this, means some part of you knew the truth all along. If this speaks to you, you’re not alone. I’m walking this road too.

He had trauma of his own.

He grew up in deep poverty, with a sweet mother who placed him on her level emotionally, and practically. She leaned on him in ways a child never should have to bear. His father was abusive. He would tell us stories of how his dad knocked them across the room for simply speaking in a tone he didn’t like. He didn’t work, and when food ran out, my grandfather took the opportunity to have a day spent visiting and eating with his parents. He visited and ate and sat unbothered, while my grandmother and her children sat in a freezing cabin with no food. He wasn’t even in a rush to bring it back.

My dad didn’t realize that so many of the stories he told us were stories of abuse normalized, and inherited. It wasn’t until I started my own healing journey that I could say, gently, “Dad… you do know what you went through was abusive, right?” I still cry when I picture him at 3 years old, wading through snow up to his knees, barefoot, gathering firewood because his father made him and told him if he kept crying, he would give him something to cry about.

My father started working at 14 and became the sole supporter of his family from that point forward. When he met my mother, it was his first serious relationship. He tried to break up with her early on because he sensed how different their upbringings were. She had grown up with money and entitlement. He knew it would be a hard dynamic to reconcile. But when he tried to leave, she threatened suicide. He was only a freshman in college, unequipped to process that kind of emotional weapon. So he stayed. And they married when he was just a sophomore.

He went to school full time, worked full time, and became a father of two before finishing college. Eventually, they’d have three children. He was the first and only person in his family to ever earn a college degree.

But at home things were not okay.

My mother was narcissistic and bipolar. And while my father was working himself to the bone to support us, he had no idea how cruel it was for me behind closed doors.

Years later, as a teenager, I remember my father saying, “I feel like I completely ignored you and your little brother growing up.” It wasn’t intentional. He was just overwhelmed. My mother consumed all of his energy with constant complaints about her life, about me, about everything. She went back to school, demanded support, and expected him to “fix” all of it. When he wasn’t giving her the attention exactly as she saw fit, she had a number of affairs through the years. I saw my father broken by those betrayals. Yet the pattern was established and he would always take her back.

And then there was my older brother, who had his own diagnoses: OCD, bipolar disorder. I’ll tell that story another day. But his presence added another layer of tension to a house that already felt like a pressure cooker.

So when Dad came home at the end of a long day, his attention was pulled by my mother’s needs and my brother’s issues. That was the moment when my little brother and I would slip out the back door into the woods behind our house, down by the creek. We read comic books together. We laughed. We found peace where we could. We were so close not just as siblings, but as survivors. He never experienced the abuse I did, by our mother, but he knew it was happening. He tried, in his own quiet way, to protect me.

We protected each other.

When I left for college, I didn’t make it long. After one semester, I was told to come home because my younger brother had been skipping school and they “needed help.” So after my finals in December, I came home. I got a job at a preschool. And it felt like life was passing me by.

Eventually, I enrolled at the local community college. And by the time my brother graduated, I was finally able to leave again, this time for a state university.

And it was there…
That I met my first serious relationship……the one that would destroy me for years.

Going no contact with one or both of your biological parents is a complicated choice.

I knew for years it was what was best for me. But I delayed. I tried. I even tested it out, like a trial run.
Something always pulled me back. Most often, it was my dad.

Today, I’m no contact with my mother.
And, when it finally happened, it was by her choice.

Last March, my parents, who had been married over 50 years, decided to file for divorce. They’re both in their 70s. But it was never a happy ending. Not once. Not even close.

A Marriage That Wasn't Love

My view of marriage has always been complicated. I didn’t grow up witnessing love or friendship or even partnership. I saw two people staying together out of obligation. Bound by public opinion, by religion, and by their three children.

My father has always had a strong relationship with religion. He believed divorce was only justified in the case of an affair. And unfortunately my mother had many of those. Affairs and separations that turned our home upside down, again and again. And yet, they always reconciled.

Even as a child, I couldn’t understand why. He had what he believed was a clear spiritual reason to leave. But he never did.

Until now.

She Was Diagnosed, But I Still Lived It

My mother was a diagnosed narcissist.
A psychiatrist gave it a name, but it didn’t make it hurt less.

She didn’t really have any redeeming qualities in our relationship, other than the fact that she gave birth to me. And maybe that was where our bond ended. She seemed to loathe me. She criticized me constantly. Compared me. Controlled me.

I still don’t wear sleeveless clothes to this day.
She said my arms were too big. That my hair looked like straw. That I didn’t sit ladylike enough in church.

She was different with my brothers. She adored them. Wore their jersey numbers. Cheered at their games. Until my older brother hit the teen years and started talking back. Then things changed. But her criticism of me never stopped.

I stayed in my room. I did my chores. I did my schoolwork. I tried to be invisible.
It didn’t protect me from her rage.

Marriage. Motherhood. And Still, Not Enough.

When I got married and became a mother, things escalated. She still criticized me. She told me the baby weight would never come off because I was big boned. But now there was a new layer: jealousy. My dad adored my children, and she hated that.

By then, she was deep into addiction. She had spent over a decade going to a pain clinic and was taking oxycontin. My younger brother went with her, and eventually, they both became addicted. When the doctor stopped prescribing, they turned to heroin.

I told her I was done. That she couldn’t be part of our lives anymore. But my dad would call. He would say he had no joy left in the world. That it broke his heart to be cut off. And I would cave. I would let her back in. Every time, I hoped maybe this time would be different.

It was never different.

And Then, She Walked Away

When they filed for divorce last year, she turned all of her rage and blame toward me.

She blocked my number. Unfriended me. Moved away without a word. She recruited others to hate me on her behalf……..people I didn’t even know well. People she pulled into her orbit to act as messengers and enforcers. The flying monkeys.

I had a one-year-old baby and other children to care for. And somehow, in the middle of all of this, a campaign was launched against me. Friends and family were told I was the reason for the divorce. I was the problem. The scapegoat again.

And the hardest part?
She was the one who went no contact with me.

The abuser walked away. Not the one who was trying to survive.

And somehow, that hurt even more.

Becoming the Emotional Dumpster

With her gone, my dad turned to me with all of his sadness. Every ache, every regret, every memory. I became the one who carried the emotional weight of both sides.

It was the heaviest year of my life.

I was a mother, trying to keep joy alive in my home.
I was a daughter, trying to understand the grief of being discarded by someone who was never really there in the first place.

So I created an Instagram page.
I called it My Mother, My First Bully.

And I started writing.

I wrote about narcissistic abuse. About addiction. About estrangement. I wrote about the pain that lingers even after you cut the cord. I wrote about what it feels like to grow up never being safe in your own home.

And slowly, people started to follow.

People who understood. People who lived it. People who had mothers like mine.
We found each other. And we built a quiet kind of solidarity.

There is something uniquely painful about being a misfit from birth.
But the loneliest kind of misfit… is the one who never fit with their own mother.

This is the part of my story I rarely share in full. But today I wanted to lay it down here, as clearly and gently as I can. If any of this feels familiar to you, I hope you know you're not alone.

If this resonates with you, I would be honored if you’d subscribe or share. There’s more to come, and I hope you’ll be part of it.

A tender moment between a mother and daughter. A new baby wrapped in love and attention. The quiet presence of someone’s mom folding laundry in the next room or bringing a snack tray unasked.

Recently, I sat with someone I love dearly as she navigated the early days of motherhood. Her mom was there too. She hovered with care, checking on her, steaming clothes for the baby’s first pictures, holding the baby so she could rest. At one point she pulled out a little gift: matching bracelets, one for the new mama and one for her newborn, each adorned with the baby’s birthstone. Such a thoughtful, loving gesture. A moment soaked in meaning.

And my heart ached.

I didn’t begrudge her. I was happy for her. But the ache came anyway. Whether I wanted it to or not.

That hollow place in me that’s known nothing but emotional absence.

Because I’ve never had that tender love of a mother and I never will.

When I had my babies, I was alone. My husband was there for the births as we did our best to manage our other children in the waiting room. But once it was over, my husband stayed at home with our other children. My mother would insist on being there for the birth also, make her showy post on Facebook and then she was gone. At more than one of my children’s births, she was very inebriated and left for 3 hours during labor to complete a drug deal. And we all knew. I was humiliated. The doctors knew as did the nurses.

We moved home just two weeks after my youngest was born. I was swollen, healing, bleeding, dealing with postpartum preeclampsia…and unpacking boxes. She didn’t help. She didn’t stay. She didn’t ask how I was. She was jealous of our home being newer than hers and she disappeared entirely.

I powered through. Like always.

That seems to be the theme of my life: keep going. Alone, if I must.

Because being alone is what I know. Sometimes being with people feels even harder. I try to shrink myself when I’m around others. I get nervous. I try not to take up space. It’s a strange grief to be more comfortable with aloneness than being cared for.

Now I see photos of this grandmother cradling the new baby with joy on her face. I feel the ache rise again. And I wonder….

Does it ever go away? Even when I’m old enough for my own mother to be gone from this world, someday, will I still feel the sting of what never was?

It’s a complicated grief.

You grieve what was done.

You grieve what was never done.

And you grieve what will never be.

I’m writing this anonymously, like I always do. Because feeling this exposed is hard.

But someone out there needs to know: You’re not the only one carrying this ache. And it makes sense that it still hurts.

It always will….because you were worthy of love, of tenderness, of bracelets and rest and someone who stayed.