A few days ago, I was listening to The Longest Shortest Time (which, by the way, if you are not familiar with, you should check it out today!), and an episode titled, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About came on. It really stuck with me and because I was on a long drive at the time, I started thinking about how this could relate to my own life. Because, you see, my mother and I have a complicated relationship (don’t we all), and although I have mostly come to terms with who she is now, it took years of therapy to unpack everything.

My mother grew up in a seriously dysfunctional family situation. She is the youngest of six kids, three of which have a different father than she does. She is truly the baby, younger than her oldest sibling by almost 20 years. Her mother, my grandmother, was a waitress, a model, and a prostitute. Her father died when she was young, maybe four-years-old. My mother grew up in an unstable home, drifting from her mother’s home, to her sisters’ homes, to a neighbor’s home. She was never just in one place with a stable loving home situation. She grew up poor, but was a spunky and intelligent person so she survived as best she could. When she was 18, she moved to the west coast to live with one of her sisters, met a man, married said man, and moved to Oregon. Once in Oregon, she met my father, divorced her husband, married my dad, and started the rest of her life. She had four children, my siblings, worked her butt off, and is retired now. She seems happy. I think she’s happy.

My childhood was equally unstable. My father did not work and is an alcoholic. My mother enabled him. This caused trauma that I am still unpacking and will likely always be unpacking. But for me as a child, I needed my mother and she was never there. She wasn’t there because she was the only one working and once she got home she worked her second shift as a housewife, doing all the tasks that my father either refused to complete, or didn’t have time to complete.

I felt unloved for most of my life. My older sisters were exceptionally smart, talented, beautiful, and charming. My brother was the baby, the only boy, and was incredibly talented in athletics. I was short, stocky, less intelligent, less athletic, certainly less charming. I was quiet, reserved, tom-boyish, and sort of weird. I wasn’t unlovable, but I wasn’t loved in the ways that I needed. I felt ignored because I was the one with the least to boast about. And as I matured, I felt pigeonholed into this role. The caretaker, the conflict resolver. I rarely, if ever, spoke up for myself. I spent most of my middle school years in my room alone wishing that I could be anywhere else. What I really wanted more than anything was my mother to love me and to show me affection. I needed this but she wasn’t able to give it to me. Or anyone really.

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As an adult in my 20’s, I struggled to loosen the grip my parents had on me. They were involved in my life but in a way that was unhealthy. I felt like I needed their approval, which I believe stems from my childhood need for the same thing. I was constantly tempering my successes against what their reactions were to them. This meant that I never really felt that proud of myself. I was always worried that they would be disappointed in me, and this had an incredible effect on how I navigated every aspect of my life. My mother and I changed our relationship when I started spending time with her as an adult. I started to hear more about her childhood and how she grew up and this made relating to her a little easier.

About 8 years ago, my father had a major health event and nearly died. I was with my mother throughout the entire thing and I helped support her. I fed her, I took her to the hospital, I texted and called her to make sure that she was ok. My siblings did none of these things and didn’t even know how to help her. But this experience changed me completely.

I hated my father, and still do in some ways, for what he had done to her. For ignoring his health long enough that it resulted in his hospitalization and a full year of surgeries and recovery. I hated him for continuing to drink after he got out of the hospital. And this hatred, this anger, this complete despair that my parents were such an amazing mess, catapulted me into therapy.

I worked really hard to unpack all the things from my childhood and the way that it shaped how I was an adult. I moved forward and stopped caring about what other people thought about me. I started relying more on my husband and less on my parents. Because the truth is, I was still trying to get them to like me, even as a full grown adult. I wanted their approval so badly, especially my mother’s, that I sacrificed my own sense of self. It was the most relieving thing I have ever experienced to let go of all of that.

So, to my mother, what I would most like to say is this:

I’m sorry that your childhood and young adulthood was so messed up. You didn’t deserve this. You deserved to be loved, hugged, celebrated because you are an amazing person. I am proud of how strong you are and I am glad that you taught me that. I wish that my own childhood could have been different. I wish that you had hugged me more, told me you thought I was special. I wish that this could have happened so that I didn’t shy away from your touch now. I wish that you had encouraged me and came to my events. I wish that you didn’t allow my father to create competition for love between me and my siblings. I wish that you had told him to stop drinking. And I wish that you had really thought I was special, instead of just thinking I was ordinary.

I am proud of myself for being who I am. I am proud that I am a good mother, that I show my kids all the affection I missed and I tell them every single day how special they are to me. I am proud of where I am professionally. I am proud that people trust me to do the job that I do. I am proud of myself for being strong and for standing up for what I believe in. I am proud of myself for not caring what you think about me.

We will never be truly close. I will always have a wall up to protect myself so you will never know the true me. And I am proud of that too. I am proud of creating the boundaries I need to be able to survive. I don’t blame you anymore, but I also am disappointed in how life was. I wish that it had been different. I wish that you could have been able to give me the emotional support I needed to thrive. And most of all, I wish that you had been able to change your own life so that you could feel this too.