Her number is still in my phone.
That is what makes it hurt in such a strange, private way.
Because the mother is not gone.
When life breaks me, there is still a small part of me that wants the thing every child is supposed to be able to want.
Not a sudden reminder that her life has been hard too.
Not the kind of conversation where I hang up feeling smaller, lonelier, and ashamed for needing anything in the first place.
A voice that softens when she hears mine break.
A voice that says, “Come here. Tell me everything.”
A voice that does not rush to fix me, correct me, compete with me, minimise me, or make my pain inconvenient.
A voice that makes my body feel like it can finally stop holding itself together.
And if you never had that, you know the grief.
You know what it is to watch other people call their mothers after a heartbreak, a diagnosis, a bad day, a breakdown, a moment where life becomes too heavy, and realise you do not have that kind of mother.
I have a mother I have to prepare for.
A mother I have to edit myself around.
A mother who might answer the phone, but still not meet me where I am.
A mother who might be alive, reachable, technically present, and still not be safe enough to hold the most fragile parts of me.
Not because I stopped needing her.
But because needing her became another place to get hurt.
That is the part I do not always say out loud.
I did not become independent because I never wanted comfort.
I became independent because comfort was not reliable.
I learned to cry without making a sound.
I learned to tell myself it was fine.
I learned to survive the moments when every part of me wanted a mother and the only mother I had made me feel worse for wanting one.
And there is a kind of grief in that that does not have a clean name.
It is not the grief of death.
It is the grief of having a mother who still exists, but not in the way my heart keeps reaching for.
It is reaching for warmth and finding performance.
Reaching for softness and finding defence.
Reaching for safety and finding the same old ache.
And one of the hardest parts of healing is accepting that she may never become the person I instinctively look for when life falls apart.
The apology may never come.
The softness may never come.
The voice that says, “I should have been safer for you,” may never come.
The mother I needed may never pick up.
But that does not mean I was too much.
It does not mean my pain was too heavy.
It does not mean I was needy, dramatic, difficult, or impossible to love.
It means I was a child asking for what should have been there.
It means my nervous system kept reaching for home in a person who never learned how to be one.
And now, slowly, I stop walking back to the same empty place.
I stop handing my breaking moments to someone who does not know how to hold them.
I stop mistaking her availability for safety.
I start building a life where my pain is not punished for existing.
Where softness does not have to come from the person who withheld it.
Where the most fragile parts of me are no longer offered to hands that keep dropping them.
I may never have the mother I call when life breaks me.
I can still be loved well.
I can still become someone who does not abandon myself in the moments she taught me I was alone.
And maybe that is where the healing begins.
Not when she finally becomes safe.
But when I stop believing her inability to comfort me means I was never worthy of comfort at all.
#motherwound #narcissisticmother #emotionallyimmaturemother #childhoodtrauma #cptsd #emotionalabuse #emotionalneglect #familytrauma #innerchildhealing #healingjourney #selftrust #complextrauma #daughterwound #psychologytruths #theSelf
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