There’s a strange moment that happens as you get older, especially as a woman. One day, you realize your mother was never supposed to have all the answers.
When we’re children, we rarely empathize with our mothers. We see them through the lens of our own needs. To us, mothers feel almost superhuman. They’re the people we call when life falls apart, the people we blame when life doesn’t feel fair, the people we expect to absorb every version of us without ever breaking.
As children, we don’t yet have the emotional range to fully grasp that the adults raising us are still learning and growing themselves.
But adulthood changes your perspective.
Eventually, you reach the age your mother once was, and suddenly everything hits differently. One day you wake up and realize your mother was once a girl too. A girl with insecurities, friendships, crushes, dreams, and moments of uncertainty. A girl who probably had no idea what she was doing half the time.
My mother had me at 19. I’m now in my 30s with no children, and there are still days when I feel like I’m figuring life out in real time. I still question myself. I still overthink decisions. I still have moments where I feel emotionally unprepared for adulthood altogether.
So when I think about a 19-year-old girl being responsible for raising another human being, I no longer see my mother through the same eyes I did as a child.
I see pressure and sacrifice. I see youth interrupted by responsibility. I see someone learning life while trying to teach life at the same time.
I think many of us arrive at this realization late. We spend so much of our lives evaluating our parents through the lens of our own experiences that we rarely stop to consider theirs. We remember disappointment before we understand pressure. We remember discipline before we recognize their stress.
For many of us, our mothers existed as emotional support humans before they were ever allowed to exist as women. Women with fears, disappointments, unmet dreams, and emotional wounds of their own. We expected them to know things nobody had probably taught them.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that you can acknowledge your childhood wounds while also recognizing your mother’s humanity.
You can admit certain things hurt without reducing your mother to only her shortcomings.
You can recognize that some women loved their children while still lacking the emotional tools, healing, support, or language to love them perfectly.
That’s the conversation we don’t have enough around motherhood.
Not every mother was nurturing in the way we needed. Not every mother got it right. Not every relationship between a mother and child is simple, soft, or easy to repair.
But many mothers were doing the best they could with limited examples, limited resources, unhealed trauma, and impossible expectations placed on them long before they became parents.
That doesn’t erase the impact. However, context always matters.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve stopped asking whether my mother was perfect because perfection was never realistic to begin with. Instead, I find myself appreciating the fact that despite everything life placed on her, she kept trying.
There’s something deeply humbling about realizing the woman you once expected to have all the answers was also navigating uncertainty. That she had moments of fear, doubt, and exhaustion too. Moments where she probably questioned herself after everyone else went to sleep, then still woke up the next morning and continued being somebody’s source of stability.
Motherhood often gets romanticized in ways that erase the complexity of the women carrying it. We celebrate mothers for what they provide, but rarely pause long enough to consider who they had to become in order to survive raising children while still trying to survive themselves.
Somewhere between paying bills, surviving heartbreak, keeping food on the table, and showing up for their children, many women lost touch with the version of themselves that existed before responsibility took over.
You start connecting the dots between who she was, what life demanded from her, and what eventually spilled into the way she loved you.
For many of us, that realization comes with grief too.
Grief for the younger versions of our mothers that never got protected properly. Grief for the dreams they postponed or for the emotional support they probably deserved but never received.
Mother’s Day gets reduced to flowers, social media captions, and performative gratitude, but it’s much deeper than that. It’s about acknowledging mothers as full human beings. Complicated human beings. Women who existed before motherhood and still exist beyond it.
For those who didn’t grow up with nurturing mothers, that’s okay. Not everybody associates motherhood with safety. Some people are still healing from abandonment, neglect, criticism, or emotional distance. Some people became adults carrying wounds that started at home. Some are now mothers themselves, trying to give their children a softer life than the one they were given.
Even then, there is still space for grace.
Not necessarily forgiveness or pretending the pain didn’t happen, but grace for yourself as you navigate becoming someone different from what hurt you.
No matter what kind of mother you had, one thing remains true: she was still once somebody’s child too. Shaped by her own disappointments, limitations, trauma, hopes, and unmet needs long before she ever became responsible for yours.
Maybe adulthood is finally understanding that our mothers were never superheroes. Just women trying their best with whatever life handed them first.
To my mom, I’m blessed to have a forever best friend who extended grace throughout my entire childhood. You gave me space to grow without pressure because the world was hard enough. It’s amazing how we can be two different people while still sharing so many similarities. I’m proud to be an adult who now understands your story and is able to return the same grace and love you have always given me.
In every lifetime, I would still choose you to be my mother.
Happy Mother’s Day. I love you.
