Reflections on My Relationship With My Mother, March 25, 2026

#ThingsYouCantUnsay #AttachmentWounds

Therapy was about my mother, again. My therapist asked me last week “what would growth look like in your mother?” So we started back when my mother first tried to reconcile with me, when I was maybe 21. She had been emotionally absent for my first puberty, and wanted to reconnect.

We sat in a café, I think. “My doctor changed my birth control without telling me.”

Now, I’ve been on hormones for coming up on three years. I’ve messed with my levels, I’ve felt the emotional rollercoaster that is having the wrong amounts of the right hormones in you. In fact, I’m probably going to lightly back off my current dose, as I think it’s a shade too high and it costing me spoons to handle my emotional roil.

So, I get that having your hormones messed with in a way that didn’t give you enough information can be really distressing. But losing the better part of ten years to not having noticed that your meds changed and having no curiosity about how your body reacts to them isn’t something I can relate to.

Back in that café, she apologized for having been emotionally absent. I don’t remember if she understood the ways she focused on her career and ignored her children, that the emotionally abusive work environment she was in pulled her away from us.

But I do remember that her advice, as I navigated my early jobs, was devoid of the self reflection I would expect from someone who misspent their child’s teenage years trying to please a corporate manager.

In the café, she showed that she’d grown, but the fullness of time demonstrated how little growth that was, and in reflection, it helped me answer my therapist’s question.

She’d need to meet me.

You can read that line dripping with blood, by the way. Meeting me isn’t easy.

And she’d need to understand that there’s no guarantee that we’ll actually be compatible.

1/2 (if you boost only one, boost the first one)