Mom Muse

Imagine waking up at 3:00 AM, heart pounding from a bad fever dream. Your first instinct is to grab the phone and call your mom. You don’t hesitate, regardless of the hour, because you know she is your safe space. You know that no matter where you are in the world, unconditional comfort is just one phone call away.

For some, this is a beautiful, everyday reality. But for others, it’s a fantasy that feels like a gut punch. So many of us have been entirely deprived of that magical, secure connection.

This absence is a quiet ache that gets exponentially louder once you become a mother yourself. Raising my daughter has brought an immense, profound healing effect into my life, but it also humbles me to my core, awakening my inner child in ways I never anticipated.

Motherhood holds up a mirror to every single thing your inner child was deprived of. It happens in the most ordinary, quiet moments of the day. You might be rocking your daughter to sleep, or carefully mashing steamed carrots for her first solid meals to make sure she is perfectly safe and nourished, and suddenly, a wave of realization hits you. You look at this tiny, innocent person and think, How could anyone have ever made a child feel unlovable?

As an adult, you are forced to continuously grieve the support you should have had. The isolation hits hardest on those days when you are utterly overwhelmed, running on empty, and the weight of the invisible load feels entirely yours to carry. You crave the “village” people always talk about. You realize no one is going to pick up the phone to soothe you—at least, not in the unconditional, motherly way you desperately hope for. For a cycle-breaker, reaching out to your own mother often means inviting judgment, criticism, or emotional chaos into your home. So, you put the phone down. You choose the exhausting peace of doing it alone over the familiar pain of being misunderstood.

I wish these words resonated with no one but me. But I know I am not the only one sitting in this quiet grief. The pain of mourning a mother while she is still very much alive and well is a very specific, suffocating type of pain. It is suffocating because the hope never fully disappears. Every holiday, every milestone your child reaches, a tiny part of you thinks, Maybe this time it will be different. Grieving someone who is still walking around in the world means accepting that the mother you needed only exists in your imagination.

But here is the good news. Here is where the story completely shifts.

This is where the heavy work becomes holy work. Because while the mirror of motherhood shows you what you lacked, it also shows you exactly what you have the immense power to create.

We do not have to pass this emptiness down. We do not have a parenting blueprint, so we get to draw our own. Drawing our own blueprint means building a completely different environment from the ground up. It means choosing slow, intentional living over chaos. It looks like filling the house with warmth, prioritizing shared home-cooked meals, and creating a physical and emotional space where our children never have to shrink themselves to be noticed.

We get to be the person our children can call, for whatever reason, whenever they need us. We get to be the harbor where they tie their ships when the waves of the world get too big—the warmly lit cottage in the forest they can always find when they feel lost.

You will hear me say this a lot in this space, and it is the foundation of everything I do: Break the intergenerational trauma cycle. Be better. Do better.