Loving My Mother, Unlearning Myself
Personal Perspective: Holding love, pressure, grief, and truth in one breath.
Updated April 20, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Mother’s Day has never felt simple to me. There’s a version of it that includes flowers, brunch, gratitude posts, and people who know exactly what they’re celebrating. I understand that version. I just don’t live inside of it. My mother was not soft. She was fierce, put together, and sharp in a way that made people pay attention . She carried herself with certainty. She handled things. She did not fall apart, and she didn’t really leave room for me to, either.
She taught me how to work. That part lives in me in a way that’s hard to separate from who I am. You push through. You don’t quit. You figure it out. There was pride in that. There still is. But there was also an edge.
If I failed, she didn’t cushion it. I remember once failing an exam and not rescheduling it right away, and she called me a “chicken sh*t.” I was hurt, angry—and something in me woke up. I didn’t just want to succeed after that. I needed to.
Another memory stayed with me even longer. She backed me into a corner once and told me that if I didn’t get my sh*t together, I was going to grow up and be a nobody. It landed in the way words sometimes do when you’re little. They don’t pass through; they take root. I have worked on that memory for years. It carried shame , fear , and something harder to name, but it also carried momentum.
That’s the part that has taken time to say honestly: That something can hurt you deeply and still shape you. That it can become fuel, even if you have to spend years untangling the cost of it. It takes work, of course. Grief has taught me how to hold this kind of truth and duality. My mother did something that, at the time, I couldn’t fully understand.
She was one of the first women in her family to get divorced , and then to do it again. I think about that now in a way I couldn’t before. I think about what it must have taken to walk out the door with three kids, one of them, me, just three years old, leaving a man who was a criminal, an alcoholic , and unpredictable.
When I left him at 17, it was terrifying. Even without fully understanding my story at the time, my body knew what I was doing. It still took everything in me. So I try to imagine her. No roadmap. No language for trauma or boundaries . Just instinct. Just knowing that staying was not an option. Grief has changed the way I see her. It has softened some edges and sharpened others. It has allowed me to see her not only as my mother, but as a woman making impossible decisions with limited support. That doesn’t erase what was hard, but it does add context.
When she died, something shifted in a way I didn’t expect, nor was I prepared for. There was grief, of course, the obvious loss. But there was also something quieter. Something that changed how I related to myself. In the dissociative system I live with, her presence had held a kind of internal structure. A pressure to be composed, to be strong, to not fall apart. When she was gone, that pressure lifted, and what followed wasn’t just grief.
It was space. Space for parts of me that had never felt safe to come forward. Younger parts. Vulnerable parts. Parts that carried shame and didn’t fit into the version of strength I had learned.
Grief didn’t just take something away. It made room. Around that time, I found the book The Dead Moms Club . It didn’t try to fix grief or make it neat. It simply told the truth that losing your mother rearranges something inside of you. Later, I came across the book The Orphaned Adult , which gave language to something I had been feeling. Even in adulthood, losing a parent can leave you untethered, not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet one.
I can still feel her in how I show up. In the way I push. In the way I question whether something is good enough. In the pull to measure myself against a standard I didn’t consciously choose. I can also feel the space her absence created.
The space to ask a different question.
Grief didn’t answer that question for me, but it made it possible to ask. Because so much of who I was had been shaped in response to her in trying to meet her, push against her, prove something to her. Grief has been the process of sorting.
What I want to carry forward.
What I’m allowed to put down.
There is so much I keep. Her strength. Her work ethic. Her refusal to stay in something that was harmful. And there are things I am still learning to loosen. The belief that I have to earn rest. The instinct to override myself. The idea that being strong means never falling apart.
I loved my mother. I still do, and I am still becoming someone outside of her. This piece is not part of my lived experience series. I will return to that. Today felt like a moment to pause and honor something many of us carry quietly.
That grief is not just about loss.
It is about change. It changes how we see the past. It changes how we understand the people who shaped us. It changes what we carry forward. If Mother’s Day feels complicated for you, you are not alone. Grief does not mean something is wrong with you. It means something mattered, and sometimes, allowing that to be true without rushing to resolve it is where healing begins to unfold.
Alexander, A. (2016). The orphaned adult: Understanding and coping with grief and change after the death of our parents . Hachette Book Group.
Spencer, K. (2017). The dead moms club: A memoir about death, grief, and surviving the mother of all losses . Seal Press.
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Adrian A. Fletcher, Psy.D., M.A., is a licensed psychologist, author, and survivor with lived experience of DID.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.