For all the understanding I’ve found, there’s still a part of me that just wants my mom.

There’s a version of me that still exists somewhere underneath all of this—not the grown woman who can process, reflect, and make sense of things, but the little girl who just wants to be held and told everything is going to be okay. That part doesn’t care how much I’ve learned or how much I’ve grown. It doesn’t care about self-awareness or healing language. It just feels.

It shows up in quiet moments and unexpected ones—when I’m tired, when something small hits a little deeper than it should, when my guard is down. And suddenly I’m not reacting as the version of me I’ve worked so hard to become. I’m reacting from a place that feels much younger, a place that still needed something it didn’t fully get.

That’s the part about healing nobody really talks about. You can understand something completely and still hurt from it. You can forgive, process, and grow, and still feel the absence. You can be strong, independent, and self-aware, and still have moments where you just want your mom—not casually, not on the surface, but in a deep, grounding, make-the-world-feel-safe kind of way.

Because no matter how old you get, that relationship shapes you. It becomes your first understanding of comfort, safety, reassurance. And when something about that isn’t steady or isn’t there the way you needed, it leaves a space that doesn’t just disappear with time. You learn to live around it. You learn to function through it. But every now and then, you feel it—and when you do, it’s not small.

I’ve done the work. I’ve looked at things from every angle. I’ve tried to understand, to give grace, to make sense of what I can. And I have. But healing doesn’t erase the part of you that needed something. It just teaches you how to hold that part differently.

Part of that, for me, is accepting something that isn’t easy. I wish I could have my image of her—the version I needed, the version I still, in some quiet way, wish existed. But if I want a relationship with her, I have to accept her as she is. She did what she could. She loved me in the ways she knew how. And maybe that doesn’t fully match what I needed, but it doesn’t mean there was no love there.

So I have to give her grace—not because it erases what hurt, but because it allows me to move forward without carrying all of it as anger. Holding onto only what was missing keeps me stuck in a place I’ve already outgrown.

Maybe in another life it would be different. Maybe in another version of this story, things would have been softer, steadier, easier. But in this life, this is what I have. And I’m learning to appreciate that I even have this version, because some little girls don’t have any version of a mother at all.

That perspective doesn’t take away the hurt, but it changes how I hold it. It softens it just enough to breathe through.

I will grieve the bond I wish I had. I won’t pretend it didn’t matter or minimize what that younger version of me needed. That grief is real, and it deserves space. But I also won’t let it take away from the bond that does exist.

Because two things can be true at once. I can miss what wasn’t there and still appreciate what is. I can feel the ache and still choose connection. I can carry the younger version of me and still move forward as the woman I’ve become.

So I’ll grieve that bond, and I’ll move forward anyway. I’ll do my best to build something real with what we have now—not perfect, not what I imagined, but honest.

And maybe that’s what healing actually looks like. Not fixing the past, but learning how to live with it without letting it break you.

~Tj🩷