The Mother Wound: Healing from Abuse She Ignored and Took to Her Grave
I wish my mother were here for me to talk to about this.
But she isn't.
It's like she took a piece of me to her grave. A piece she owed me. The piece of being my protector. The piece of being a good mother who shields her child from harm.
She abused the trust I had in her.
What mother does that to their child? To their daughter?
And yet - even as I write those words - another truth sits beside the anger: She was doing the best she could. As a single mother. As someone distant from her own mother. She lacked the skills to mother me because she didn't have any.
I can have empathy toward her. Even though I still do not understand her lack of helping me.
The Silence That Followed
Even after the abuse, she didn't offer counseling. She swept it under the rug. We never talked about it.
Instead, I was there for her. Taking care of her needs. Her bills. Whatever she wanted. Clothes. Hair. Nails.
I was seeking approval and validation from her. Always.
That's the same pattern she shared with her own mother. And I did the same thing - continuing the cycle, desperate for crumbs of love from someone who couldn't give me what I needed.
She never talked about it. Not once.
Not before she passed away. It wasn't one of those deathbed confessions where everything gets cleared up and forgiven. Nothing.
I have heard more from her in my dreams and from the ancestor realm about how sorry she was than I ever heard in my reality.
What I Wish I Had Done
I wish it could have been different.
I wish I had believed in myself more. I wish I had tuned in sooner. I wish I had confronted my darkness - the trauma I kept hidden in the closet of my mind - before she passed away.
I wish I had confronted her instead of being left here with so many questions and so much anger.
But I didn't. And now she's gone. And the opportunity for that conversation - for accountability, for understanding, for closure - went with her.
The Impossible Contradiction
Here's what makes this so hard:
I miss her still. I love her.
My inner child loves her even though she is still upset with her. Furious with her. Confused by her.
She was our first contact with the world. Our first experience of what love and safety were supposed to feel like.
And we don't know where to place her now. On a list of enemies? Or people that we love?
I feel crazy for caring. For missing someone who allowed something brutal to happen to me. For grieving someone who swept my pain under a rug and never acknowledged it.
I couldn't go to her grave for years because of it.
The anger was too big. The betrayal too deep. The love too confusing.
Healing from the Grave
When your mother is the one who was supposed to protect you - and she didn't - the wound runs deeper than almost anything else.
Because mothers are supposed to be safe. They're supposed to shield us. Fight for us. Believe us. Stand between us and harm.
When they don't, when they actively participate in our harm or allow it to continue, something fundamental breaks.
And when they die before you can confront them, before you can ask "Why?" and demand answers - you're left holding all of it alone.
The anger. The love. The questions. The grief that's layered with betrayal.
You're grieving someone who hurt you. And that's one of the loneliest experiences there is.
What I Know Now
I'm learning that I don't have to choose between loving her and being angry with her. Both can be true at the same time.
I'm learning that I can honor the ways she was limited - by her own trauma, her own mother wound, her lack of tools - while still holding her accountable for what she didn't do.
I'm learning that healing doesn't require her to be here. It doesn't require a deathbed confession or an apology I'll never receive.
Healing requires me to mother myself in the ways she couldn't.
To give myself the protection, the validation, the unconditional love that she wasn't equipped to give.
To break the pattern of seeking approval from someone who couldn't see me clearly.
To place her somewhere in my heart that holds both the truth of what she did AND the truth that she was wounded too.
She doesn't have to be an enemy or a saint. She can be human - flawed, limited, and yes, complicit in my harm - while also being someone I loved and who loved me in the only broken way she knew how.
If You're Healing a Mother Wound
If you're navigating the impossible contradiction of loving someone who failed to protect you - please know you're not crazy.
You're not weak for missing someone who hurt you.
You're not less strong for still seeking answers you'll never get.
The mother wound is one of the deepest wounds we carry. And when it's layered with abuse, with silence, with death - it becomes even more complex.
You don't need to have it figured out. You don't need to forgive before you're ready. You don't need to choose between love and anger.
You can hold all of it.
In the Soft Hearts Society™, we create space for exactly this - the messy, contradictory, impossible grief of healing from mother wounds, especially when our mothers are no longer here to answer our questions.
We don't demand forgiveness or understanding or neat closure.
We simply hold you while you navigate the terrain of loving someone who harmed you. While you mother yourself. While you break the patterns that were passed down through generations.
You'll find:
Weekly livestreams where we process mother wounds without pressure to "just forgive."
Ancestral healing work that helps you understand generational patterns
Sacred space to grieve someone who was both your first love and your first wound
A sisterhood that understands the contradiction of missing someone who failed you
You don't have to have the answers. You just have to be willing to feel all of it.
Come sit with us. We're here.
With love and softness,
Allonia
