Improve Your Relationship With Your Mother

Some mothers turn out to be everything we dreamed of: loving, patient, quick to understand and ready to accept us as we are. Plenty of mothers aren't. When yours falls short of what you hoped for, the letdown can run deep, and there's almost no one capable of wounding you the way she can, even long after you've grown up. Usually she means no harm at all. But we tend to be unusually tuned to our mothers, and we absorb what they say and do as if it were aimed straight at the core of us.

A lot of mothers are remarkable in countless small ways. They rarely vanish from a child's life the way some fathers do. They feed us, worry over us, prop us up as best they can, and they're the one we sprint toward the moment we scrape a knee or feel crushed. The picture most of us carry of the ideal mother is someone gentle and warm, someone who would take in every one of our faults, read us perfectly, and keep cheering us on.

Reality is stingier with that picture. Very few women manage to embody it. The ones who can tend to have done a great deal of inner work and carry a strong sense of self-awareness. Everyone else is improvising. That isn't a sign they don't care. The opposite, really: the majority pour themselves into the job and lie awake wondering whether they're getting it right. What trips them up is the baggage they never sorted through. Their own unresolved feelings leak out in how they behave, and we end up on the receiving end without either of us quite clocking what happened.

So the bond gets frayed. You might carry a specific memory of a moment you badly needed her and she had nothing to give. Maybe you felt dropped, isolated, read completely wrong. Whether that happened last month or back when you were tiny, the ache doesn't necessarily fade. Forgiving her can feel almost impossible, because she didn't behave the way a mother is 'supposed' to. Sensing she walked away from a duty and that you paid for it is a heavy kind of disappointment.

There's a flip side too, where admitting she hurt you is the hard part. Propping up a flawless image of her does its own damage. Every time you excuse her failures at your own cost, you quietly tell yourself you mattered less. Those currents spread. They can crack your other relationships, chip away at your sense of worth, push you into patterns that work against you, on top of whatever they do to the relationship with her directly.

How do you get out from under all that? Part of it means prying apart two things that have fused in your head: the mother you decided a mother 'should' be, and the actual woman who raised you. That split is painful to make. Our hunger for love with no conditions keeps us clutching the hope that she'll finally deliver it, even when she never once has. For your own sake, that hope may have to be set down.

The bar we set for our mothers is often absurdly high, leaving no space for her to simply be a person. Rather than measuring her against a fantasy, you can try to see her as the individual she is. Looking at who she actually is, instead of what she might hand you, is where the healing starts. She's a flawed human, the same as you, with her own worries and private joys and ambitions that have nothing to do with you at all. Sitting with that tends to soften things into understanding.

Releasing the should-be version of a mother also asks something larger of you, something closer to spiritual than tactical. Realizing she can't meet your emotional needs doesn't make those needs evaporate. They're real and they stay. Pretending otherwise only buries them. Acceptance, love, support: every person is wired to want these. If your mother can't supply them, then where does that leave you?

Expecting another person to step in and love you like a perfect mother isn't fair to them. It would mean they shelve every one of their own needs to orbit yours, and once you're an adult, nobody owes you that. Grown relationships run on equality and on both people giving ground. So the love has to be sourced somewhere else. How you picture that source depends entirely on you and what you make of God, spirituality, religion, psychology. Some find the unconditional love they're after through God, some through a spiritual dimension, some through a Higher Power. Others learn to extend that love to themselves.

The thread running through all of those is the same: this acceptance can't hinge on anyone but you. Keep waiting for other people to love and approve of you and you've handed them the keys to your own happiness. Taking that back means locating the love somewhere that doesn't depend on a single other person, somewhere between you and the divine. Once you've got it, you can stop demanding it from your mother, who, for all her good intentions, may simply be unable to give it in the shape you wanted. That's what opens the door to loosening the resentment, meeting her with more understanding, and starting something healthier. - Iman Mohiki