My Mother Was Brave Enough to Hear Me

Mothers come to me wanting to repair relationships with their adult children over and over again. They want healing to be normalized in their family. They miss their children, and they miss their grandchildren. They are confused about how decades of birthday parties, Christmas mornings, scraped knees, school pickups, packed lunches, financial sacrifices, sleepless nights, and all the millions of ordinary acts that constitute motherhood somehow became reduced to a list of things they did wrong; and underneath all of that grief is usually some version of the same plea: When does my child try to understand me?

I understand that question more than most. I also think, particularly at the beginning of reconciliation, it is often the wrong question because there is an order to generational healing that we sometimes desperately want to reverse. We want our children to see our humanity so that we can feel safe enough to acknowledge theirs, yet, as mothers, we have to be brave enough to do it the other way around, and I know this because my mother did.

The earlier pieces in this series show that I have spent years trying to understand my own programming. I studied attachment, family systems, generational patterns, anxiety, and trauma. I have learned the roles children adopt to survive dysfunctional systems. I began looking at the lineage of women in my own family and recognizing how much of what we call “personality” is sometimes simply adaptation passed from one generation to another with a cute little bow tied around it and a family saying like, well, that's just how we are, except sometimes, how we are is hurting everybody.

My mother came from her own extraordinarily painful history. She survived things that shaped her long before I ever entered the world. She learned to mother children before she should have been responsible for mothering anyone. She learned to survive abuse, to endure, and she learned to leave. She joined the Army, in part, because she was trying to escape a system that had already taught her far too much about what it meant to be a woman responsible for everyone around her without any say in the matter for herself.

Then, she became a mother, and she did what most of us do; she parented from what she knew. Some of what she knew was beautiful; some of it wasn't, and there lies one of the most difficult truths of generational healing: a parent can have done the absolute best she knew how to do, and her child can still have been harmed; both can be true. We don't have to put one woman on trial to validate the other, but for years, I think that was exactly what both of us feared,

“But You Need to Understand What I Went Through.”

I understand why mothers say this; I really do. Imagine surviving your own childhood, clawing your way through adulthood, making decisions with limited resources and limited emotional tools, sacrificing things your children will never know you sacrificed, only to have them become adults and tell you how badly you hurt them. It is perfectly natural that something inside of you screams:

But you don't understand.

You don't know what I was going through.

You don't know what your father did.

You don't know what my mother did.

You don't know how alone I was.

You don't know how hard I tried.

Your child probably doesn't know; maybe someday they should, but if your first response to their pain is an explanation of yours, they probably aren't going to hear your humanity. They're going to hear another reason their pain has to wait, again. That is the part I think we miss.

Children who were harmed need to be witnessed before they can be asked to become witnesses for us. This is true even when they're forty; even when they're seventy; and yes, even when they are mothers themselves, because being an adult does not magically rewrite what happened to the child who lived inside that family. This is where my mother did something extraordinarily brave, she eventually stopped trying to win the case, and she listened.

Our healing didn't begin because my mother suddenly agreed with every interpretation I had of my childhood. It didn't begin because we sat down and created some notarized statement of facts in which every disputed memory was finally adjudicated and everyone initialed at the bottom.

Thank God. I'm a lawyer. I have done enough of that for one lifetime. Our healing began when I could tell her what something had felt like to me without her immediately needing to tell me why I had perceived it incorrectly. She became curious, asked questions, and allowed me to describe pain without treating my pain as an accusation. She began saying things like: I see that now, and I'm sorry. Those words created more movement in our relationship than years of defending ourselves ever had because once I no longer had to fight to convince her that I had been hurt, something remarkable happened. I became capable of seeing her, not just as my Mother, but as a woman. The young woman who had been hurt herself. The woman who made impossible decisions with the tools she had. The woman who survived relationships that frightened her. The woman who was trying to raise children while carrying wounds she did not yet have language for. The woman who made mistakes. The woman who loved me.

I could finally hold all of her complexity because I was no longer desperately trying to convince her to hold mine; that is the bridge, and someone has to be brave enough to build the first plank; my mother was.

Now, before this begins sounding suspiciously like an article about everything mothers should do differently while I sit over here sipping coffee in my pristine glass house, allow me to introduce you to my own motherhood. I have a sixteen-year-old daughter and believe me when I say I have eaten crow, a lot of crow. Enough crow that, frankly, somebody should check the local population.

I was an anxious mother, I yelled, I was authoritarian, and I confused control with safety. I used shame and guilt to create compliance because those were tools I understood. I believed good parenting meant keeping children on the right path, and when fear told me they might veer from it, I tightened my grip. My intentions were often loving; many mothers could say the same. Some of my behaviors were still damaging, and again, both can be true.

My children would probably tell you I am light-years different from the mother I was when they were younger, but that change did not happen because they finally learned to appreciate how stressed I was. It happened because I began listening. I had to acknowledge that my daughter did not need to understand my anxiety before I took responsibility for how my anxiety affected her. It scared her, and she would shut down, feeling absolutely unheard and unsafe. She did not need to say, “Mom, I completely understand why your childhood trauma caused you to become controlling,” before I could say, “I shouldn't have handled that the way I did.” She's my child, and it is not her job to reparent me so that I can parent her. That one stings a little, doesn't it, but it matters.

This is where I sometimes challenge mothers in my work. You absolutely are a woman outside of motherhood, you deserve respect, you deserve boundaries, and you deserve compassion you have wounds and needs and experiences that matter tremendously. Your adult children do not have the right to abuse you simply because they are your children, but if you are seeking repair for wounds that happened within the parent-child relationship, you cannot begin by demanding that your child first relate to you as though you are simply two unrelated adults standing on equal historical footing.

You were never on equal footing. You are the parent; that doesn't make you guilty of everything. It means you carried a different responsibility. Caregiving will always flow primarily in one direction because that is exactly how it is supposed to work. So, if the wound originated there, healing may need to begin there too. Healing that sounds like tell me what happened for you; tell me what you remember; tell me what you needed; tell me what hurt; and I am going to try to listen without immediately explaining myself.

Then, when enough safety exists, something beautiful can happen. The adult child may finally become curious about the woman behind the mother. When my mother started opening spaces that were safe and unassuming, I was free to ask questions like, what happened to you? Why were you so afraid? What did Grandma teach you? What were you surviving?What did you never receive? What didn't you know yet? That is where generational healing becomes mutual, but compassion offered under demand is not really compassion. It has to have somewhere safe to grow.

We cannot celebrate the rebuilding if we refuse to admit there were ruins. I don't worry anymore about writing honestly about my mother. There was a time when I would have been terrified. What if she reads this? What if she thinks I'm blaming her? What if she believes I'm making her look terrible? Today, I don't carry that same fear, because I know that she knows. She knows these things happened because she has acknowledged them. She knows I was hurt because she cried with me as I let it all go. She also knows I understand that some of what happened to me was not something she consciously chose for me, and although it was real, it isn’t all her fault. Some of it came through decisions she made while trying to survive circumstances of her own.

Acknowledging the consequence does not require me to condemn the person. That is the maturity I didn't have before, and her ability to hear that distinction is part of the bravery she didn't have before. We both changed, and I want to give my mother credit for something enormous: she became brave enough to hear me and hold space for me without making it about hear fear, her grief, her hurt feelings, or her guilt. She allowed me to tell the truth about the ruins without demanding that I first reassure her that she had built a beautiful house; and because she did, eventually I could turn around and look at what she had survived too. That is part of why we have a relationship today.

This concept is not a new one. All of the rhetoric out there on mental health and parenting today says, you cannot regulate a child from a place of dysregulation. We have a relationship not because the past disappeared, not because every necessary conversation has occurred, and not because every wound received a perfectly articulated apology. Healing was birthed when we stopped requiring one person's humanity to cancel out the other's.

My pain doesn't erase hers and her pain doesn't erase mine. Her intentions don't erase my experiences, and my experiences don't erase her love; this is what generational healing actually looks like. The goal is not determining which generation was right; not deciding who suffered more; and not demanding that our children forgive us because we did better than our parents did. It is having enough courage to say: Something happened here. It hurt you. I want to understand. I can survive hearing your experience without making it an indictment of my entire existence, and when you are ready, perhaps you will want to know mine too.

My mother gave me that gift, and now I have the blessing to give it to my own children; maybe that is how generational trauma finally begins to lose its power. One generation isn’t tasked to get everything right. Eventually, one becomes brave enough to stop defending the pattern and start listening to what it did; if you are a mother trying desperately to repair a relationship with an adult child and you keep finding yourself thinking, but when are they going to understand me, I can help you explore a different place to begin. You don’t have to abandon yourself, or accept abuse, or agree that every accusation made against you is objectively or subjectively true.  Empathy is not agreement; it’s putting yourself in the shoes of your child and learning how to become safe enough to hear their experience without immediately requiring them to take care of yours. Sometimes the bridge back to our children begins with the hardest words a mother can say: Tell me what it was like for you no matter how much it will hurt. I'm listening.

Book a Free Strategy Session here, I can listen to your hurt so you have a place for it to land while you build the courage to be the bridge for you and your own child. I can help you understand why empathy breeds empathy, and trusting the order of the forgiveness process is what is necessary for lasting trust and mutual understanding. We will explore why you feel things are unfair and help you to create a plan for opening up a dialogue even though fear holds you back. Be brave, you will thank yourself later.

Always Shining.

XO Ashley