From Mother Hunger To Mothered

Growing up with a mother like mine does not just leave you without love. It leaves you without a blueprint for what love is supposed to feel like. You do not know what you are missing because you have never had a reference point. You just grow up thinking that love is conditional, that it requires earning, that warmth from a woman who is supposed to care for you is something you have to perform well enough to receive. And even then, it is never guaranteed. That is what a mother like ours does. She does not just withhold love. She distorts your entire understanding of it, so that by the time you are an adult, you are walking around half convinced that the hollow feeling inside you is just who you are rather than what she created.

The mother wound is not just about what you did not get. It is about what her absence and her cruelty taught you to expect from every mother figure who comes after her. You learn to brace. You learn to scan. You learn to wait for the moment the warmth turns cold, because in your experience it always does. Mother figures felt like a threat more than a comfort, because the first one taught you that love from a mother is the most dangerous kind. It comes with conditions you cannot always see until you have already broken them. It comes with a cost that keeps increasing. It comes wrapped in something that looks like affection and functions like a cage. So you stop reaching. You stop hoping. You become entirely self-sufficient because self-sufficiency felt safer than the alternative.

What has happened to me has quietly dismantled something I did not even realise I was still carrying. I went from having no mother figure who truly cared, to being surrounded by mother figures who love hard. Not softly. Not cautiously. Hard. The kind of love that does not wait to see if you deserve it first. My Madrina (Italian Godmother) Simona came into my life less than a year ago and immediately loved me in a way my own mother never once managed across an entire lifetime. The birthday she created for me yesterday had love threaded through every single detail. She thought about me. She planned around me. She made me feel like somebody worth celebrating. And I am not going to pretend that did not break something open in me, because it did. My inner child had been waiting her whole life for a mother figure to show up like that.

Mama Roe has been in my life since I was 23 and long before I had the language for any of this, she was already showing me what safe maternal love could look like. Steady. Consistent. There when I needed her without making me feel like a burden for needing. And then my childhood best friend’s parents recently came back into my life and even more healing arrived in the quietest ways. Her mum making me pancakes for breakfast. Her dad turning on the lamp and closing the blinds before I went to bed each night. Small things. Invisible things to anyone who grew up being cared for. But when your mother taught you that you were not worth the small things, that basic tenderness was something other children received and not you, your body remembers every single act of gentleness it was ever denied. And it notices, deeply, when those things finally arrive.

I spent years convinced that this kind of love simply did not exist for me. That I was the exception. That I would always be the one giving it, never the one receiving it, because that is what my mother’s behaviour trained me to believe about my own worth. The mother wound does not just make you grieve the mother you never had. It makes you doubt whether you are even loveable enough to be mothered at all. And then life sends you mother figures like these. Mother figures who love without agenda. Mother figures who do not make you earn it or perform for it or shrink yourself to keep it. Mother figures who just love you, loudly and consistently and without conditions. I went from emotional orphan to this. From nothing to abundance. From a mother who made me feel like a burden to mother figures who make me feel like a gift. That healing is real. And it is the most amazing thing I have ever experienced.