Forgiveness Doesn't Come First, Self Parenting Did

Forgiveness Doesn't Come First. Self Parenting Did.

I didn't hate my mother. I just ached for something she couldn't give.

She is a courageous woman. She traveled thousands of miles in pursuit of a better life for me. That is not nothing. That is everything. And still, I used to get so frustrated that she couldn't nurture me in the ways I needed. The ways I was starving for. She did what she could with what she had. But what I needed and what she had were not the same shape.

The absence lived in my body. By the time I was an adult, when she would try to console me, reach for me, offer comfort, I couldn't receive it. Physical touch from her felt foreign. Uncomfortable in a way I couldn't explain or logic my way out of. My body had already built the wall. It had learned to stop expecting. And when the thing you stopped expecting suddenly arrives, the body doesn't know what to do with it.

That is not her fault. That is not my fault either. That is what unmet needs do over time. They calcify.

The shift did not start with forgiving her. It started with my body.

Months of somatic work began softening something I did not even know was hardened. And in that softening a question surfaced that I was not prepared for.

What if my daughter felt about me the way I feel about my mother?

I was not prepared for how much that wrecked me. The thought of her growing up and not being able to receive me. Flinching at my comfort. Feeling the ache of something I couldn't give her. It would break my heart into pieces.

And that is the moment I could finally see my mother as a human being.

Not as the woman who failed me. But as someone who was also broken before she ever became my mother. She gave away her power to a man who was a monster and it shattered her. Yet she still traveled thousands of miles to give me a better life. She still showed up. Imperfectly, painfully, incompletely. But she showed up.

The biggest part of parenting is healing your own trauma. Breaking those generational curses. Because there is nothing more heartbreaking than watching your child suffer with the same habits and tendencies that you do. Being so young myself, kids having kids, I had a clear perception of what had been projected onto me. And I made a vow when I became a mother to give my daughter a more evolved version of relationship than I had ever seen.

That vow is what made compassion possible. Not for her sake. For mine. And for my daughter's.

I could have compassion for the human in my mother once I had mothered myself enough to recognize the wound in her. Her flaws were also my own. And I could choose to overcome them instead of being weighed down by them. I could be grateful for what she was able to give me without pretending the rest didn't hurt.

That is not forgiveness as a gift to her. That is freedom as a gift to myself.

Aho.