Before She Was Mom

A month before my mom died, we went to lunch.

Neither of us knew, of course, that there was a clock running.

We’d had a rough few years. The kind where love doesn’t disappear, but gets buried under enough hurt and misunderstanding that you can almost forget it’s there.

Something had started to shift between us, though.

That day, I told her I was sorry. And I told her I forgave her.

I don’t remember every word that followed. I remember feeling like we had finally found our way back to each other. The past was still ours, but it didn’t have to decide what came next. I was ready for the kind of closeness I think we had both wanted for a long time.

I could finally see where some of it had come from.

And I didn’t have to minimize my own experience to try and understand hers.

More Than My Mother

For most of my life, I’d experienced my mom primarily as just that: my mom.

Her choices affected me. Her mistakes affected me. I measured our relationship through what she gave me and what I needed from her.

It had taken me a long time to consider the woman underneath the job title.

She had been somebody’s daughter before she was my mother. She’d had a childhood I wasn’t there for. Relationships that shaped her. Losses. Fear. Expectations. Ways of surviving that had been formed long before she had me.

None of that erased my side of the story.

It just meant there was another side.

I didn’t realize it then, but that lunch would be one of the last chances I’d have to tell her I could finally see it.

After she died, I kept coming back to that conversation.

And eventually to a question I hadn’t really considered before:

How often are we so busy needing the people we love that we forget they need something from us, too?

Our mothers are people. This feels oddly easy to forget.

There’s something strange about being someone’s child.

We meet our parents already in character.

Mom. Dad.

We don’t meet the twenty-year-old version. We don’t meet the girl who hadn’t yet decided what kind of mother she would be. We get pieces through photographs and stories. We weren’t there.

So we know them by what they mean to us.

Did you protect me?

Did you listen to me?

Did you show up?

Did you give me what I needed?

Those are fair questions. Children are supposed to need their parents.

The trouble is that we grow up and keep asking only those.

We rarely turn them around.

What did she need?

After my mom died, I couldn’t put that question down.

So I went looking.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWING SOMEONE AND SEEING THE WHOLE PERSON

My mom had been my mom for my entire life.

I could tell you where she’d hurt me. I could not tell you much about what had hurt her.

The first thing I found was a line I haven’t been able to shake.

In 1975, the child psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues wrote:

“In every nursery there are ghosts.” (Fraiberg et al., 1975, p. 387)

They meant the parent’s own childhood. Old hurts she doesn’t remember inviting in. They sit in the room while she raises her baby, and they shape what she does.

Fifty years of attachment research has mostly proved her right. How a mother was loved tends to show up in how she loves her own child. But the pattern isn’t a sentence handed down. What matters most is not whether a mother had a hard childhood. It’s whether she has been able to make sense of it and tell the story of it clearly (van IJzendoorn, 1995).

I thought about the ghosts my mom carried into my nursery. Some I knew by name. Most I never met.

Then I thought about the ones I carried.

The second thing I found was closer to home.

In 1971, researchers Vern Bengtson and Joseph Kuypers noticed that parents and their grown children describe the same relationship differently. Parents tend to report more closeness. Children tend to report more distance. They called it the developmental stake (Bengtson & Kuypers, 1971). A parent has poured a life into the relationship and needs it to have been good. A child has spent years becoming her own person inside it and needs room to say where it wasn’t.

Neither one is lying.

Psychologist Karen Fingerman spent years interviewing aging mothers and their adult daughters. She didn’t find love on one side and resentment on the other. She found both, in both women, often in the same afternoon (Fingerman, 2001).

That lunch gave me room for both.

I could forgive my mom without needing either of us to be wrong about what we had lived. We had lived the same moments from two different places.

My experience still mattered.

So did hers.

The third concept was about how we keep someone known.

Psychologist John Gottman has spent decades studying couples. The ones who last keep what he calls a love map: a working knowledge of the other person’s inner world. Their worries. Their hopes. What’s weighing on them this week. And they keep it current (Gottman & Silver, 1999).

Gottman studied marriages. The idea travels.

Most of us drew our map of our mothers when we were children. Then we stopped drawing.

Brené Brown defines connection as what passes between people when they feel “seen, heard, and valued” (Brown, 2010, p. 19).

I read that line more than once. Seen. Heard. Valued.

Nowhere in it was needed.

At that lunch, for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t looking only at my mother.

I was seeing the woman she had always been.

BEING NEEDED ISN’T QUITE THE SAME AS BEING VALUED

This is where my original question changed.

I started wondering about the people we need and whether we sometimes mistake needing them for valuing them.

They aren’t the same.

Being needed says something about what you provide in my life.

Being valued asks whether I can also see you.

That distinction extends well beyond mothers and daughters.

Partners become the person we rely on.

Friends become the person we call.

Coworkers become the person who always knows what to do.

We can love people deeply and still become so accustomed to what they are to us that we stop wondering what it’s like to be them.

Maybe that’s one reason being truly understood feels different from simply being useful.

What I carry from my mom is something quieter.

The people we love can become so familiar in the roles they play in our lives that we forget there is an entire person on the other side of the relationship.

A history we weren’t there for.

Fears they don’t always tell us about.

Things they regret.

People they miss.

Versions of themselves we’ve never met.

And needs of their own.

Maybe valuing someone isn’t only appreciating everything they are to us.

Maybe sometimes it’s trying to understand who they are when it isn’t about us.

There are questions I can’t ask my mom anymore.

But there are people in my life I still can.

And maybe that’s the question I’m left with, and one we can all ask:

Who in your life has become so familiar that you’ve forgotten how much there still is to ask?

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References

Bengtson, V. L., & Kuypers, J. A. (1971). Generational difference and the developmental stake. Aging and Human Development, 2(4), 249–260. https://doi.org/10.2190/AG.2.4.b

Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden.

Fingerman, K. L. (2001). Aging mothers and their adult daughters: A study in mixed emotions. Springer Publishing Company.

Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14(3), 387–421. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-7138(09)61442-4

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work. Crown.

van IJzendoorn, M. H. (1995). Adult attachment representations, parental responsiveness, and infant attachment: A meta-analysis on the predictive validity of the Adult Attachment Interview. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 387–403. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.387