Becoming the Mother I Needed: A Four-Part Series on My Journey to Heal the Mother Wound

Part One - The Mother I Am Still Becoming: Committed to Breaking the Pattern

Photo by Sergiu Vălenaș on Unsplash

As Mother’s Day approaches, I wanted to offer a few honest reflections that have helped me make peace with the complexities this season can stir.

This month, I’m sharing stories drawn from my own journey, a path shaped by longing, loss, and the slow work of becoming.

If stories of mothering feel too tender or painful for you right now, I understand. Feel free to follow what speaks to you and skip what does not.

Alongside the series this month, I will continue to offer lighter moments, including the Heart’s Content Questionnaire, and a One Heartful Thing poem.

I’m grateful you are here, however you choose to engage.

Rooted in truth, opening to joy.

xo Mary

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Before We Begin

This series traces a journey from inherited pain to intentional mothering, from generational grief to personal reclamation, and from honest truth-telling to being held by a Love greater than the one I lost.

Over the next four weeks, I’ll explore the layered truths of my own story - what I inherited, what I’ve chosen to change, and how I’ve come to recognize the sacred and slow process of becoming.

Here is the path we will walk together:

• The Mother I Am Still Becoming (May 4) Committed to breaking the pattern of generational trauma

• Reclaiming Mother’s Day (May 11)
  Learning to hold both grief and gratitude

• Stories We Tell About Mothers: What Korean Dramas Reveal and What They Leave Out (May 18)

• The Mothering God (May 27)
  Being held by the Love I had always longed for

I hope you will join me in the conversation. You are welcome here, wherever you are in your story.

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Part 1: The Mother I Am Still Becoming: Committed to Breaking the Pattern

None of us enters motherhood with a clean slate.

We carry with us the experiences of how we were mothered—what we received and what we longed for. The family patterns that shaped us. The shame. The silence. The untold stories. And also the gifts, the grace, and the love that broke through.

Somewhere deep inside, many of us make a quiet promise to do things differently. To love differently. To live and to mother differently. I made that promise, too.

This is the story of how I tried to keep that promise. How I began the slow, uncertain work of becoming the kind of mother I had always longed for, both for my daughters and for myself.

My mother was both mesmerizing and chaotic. She was frenetic, narcissistic, and deeply unpredictable. She was magical, and when she loved, she loved intensely, but it was all tied to the tides of her chronic, undiagnosed mental illness. I watched her brilliance and her unraveling, and I knew what it was to be needed and neglected in the same breath. So when I became a mother myself, I inherited a map that I knew I did not want to follow, but I had no new map to guide me.

Here’s what I knew. I knew what it looked like for a mother to disappear from my life. To not only abandon, but also to vanish emotionally, even when she stayed. I knew how easy it was to get lost in the emotional landscape of my mother’s terrain, trying to find my way through her pain. I did not want that to be my children’s map. I wanted to be a good mother. (Whatever that means. ) For me, at the time, it simply meant not like mine.

My mother began her mothering journey at sixteen. She was still a child. I may have started later than her, at twenty-five, but I still had a lot of growing up to do. When I was pregnant with my first child, I was terrified that I might become like my mother, but I also wasn’t sure who else I could become. I would have to navigate this new terrain and create the map along the way.

In those early years of learning to be a mother, I hovered between my devotion to my daughters and my deep self-doubt. I watched myself, measuring every reaction, afraid I might echo her tone, her volatility, her unpredictability. Like an emotional shopping list, I wanted to keep her positive qualities of playfulness and magic, and avoid her dysfunctional ones. I wanted my children to feel safe with me, to know that I loved them, that I would make their needs a priority, and that I would never leave them. I wanted them to feel the deep safety of belonging, comfort, steadiness, and dependability. I wanted to mirror their goodness back to them.

I read so many parenting books at the time. ( Shout out to all of us who read the T. Berry Brazelton books). I was looking for a map, something to steady me and show me how to become the mother I longed to be. I did not trust my instincts yet. I was only clear on what I would not do.

So I filled notebooks, tried strategies, and clung to words that felt like lifelines. Hard as it may be to imagine, there was no internet at the time, no Google for help, no Facebook group for mothers. And all the incredible work on trauma and intergenerational healing —Peter Levine, Gabor Mate’ and others— was not available yet. It was often lonely and confusing trying to find my way toward something new. So, in addition to reading books and calling my maternal grandmother every day, I started a parent support group that met in my home. We championed each other to work on our stories and envision a new way of parenting that honored and respected children. It was new territory for all of us.

Diving Deeper

Although my mother ran away for good when I was twenty-three, I was never afraid I would abandon my children. That was never the battle. What I struggled with was deeper and harder to name. I worried that even though I stayed, I might not be safe to stay with.

Would I become my mother?

I had inherited patterns I did not want to repeat: emotional chaos, unpredictability, physical and emotional abuse, the pull to make my children responsible for my unmet needs. I believed I could do it differently, but I also knew it would take deep, ongoing work, and I had no idea how to begin. It wasn’t about checking the box on some external checklist of what it meant to be a“ good mother” from society’s viewpoint; it was far deeper.

The real challenge was to heal what lived in me and face the generational trauma I carried. Unlearn the reflexes I did not even know were there. Rewire what mothering meant inside my body. Learn what it meant to mother from a place of steadiness and love.

Like most mothers of my generation, the struggle was mostly invisible to others.

No one could see the war I was waging within myself. But my daughters felt the result of my work. They felt my softness. My steadiness. My choice, over and over again, to love them with intention. And I felt how good it was to be able to offer it to them. But they also felt my unresolved trauma and my failures. They saw the cracks, but they also saw the repair. They lived inside the imperfect dome of a mother who was still becoming. And somehow, they kept offering me grace. Children trust because that is what children do. And I did my best to be worthy of that trust, even when I could not always get it right.

But mothering, it turns out, is not about getting everything right.

It is a relationship you build, moment by moment, sometimes in tears, sometimes in laughter, in the special moments and in messes and mundane rhythms that no one ever witnesses or applauds. And somehow, in all those ordinary hours, something inside me began to shift toward deeper awareness and healing.

Not because I had it all figured out, but because I kept choosing to stay present, to stay soft, and to keep learning. I kept fighting for my daughters to have a different experience. I fought to recognize where I had failed and to try to do it differently next time. Recalculating…

Our children don’t ask us to be perfect. That’s the fear we bring with us. What they really ask is for us to stay present and love them. And honestly, they’re so easy to love. In loving them, we begin to change. Because that’s what love does. It reshapes us, from the inside out and the outside in. I became someone they knew loved them, even when I messed up.

There was such freedom in that. To see that things could be different. To feel, in my bones, that I was not doomed to repeat the story I came from. It was encouraging. Empowering. I was becoming the kind of mother I could feel proud of being. And still, there were days when it all felt so fragile.

There is one moment that lives in me. It was not big or dramatic at the time, but looking back, I see the early shift in the legacy of generational healing.

My eldest daughter was maybe four or five. I had gotten sharp with her that day. I do not remember the details, only the tightness in my body afterward and the harsh tone of voice. That uneasy feeling that I had sounded too much like my mother. It scared me.

So later that day, I knelt beside her and said, “If Mommy ever gets too loud or looks scary, or if it looks like Mommy is gone and some mean lady is standing there instead, you are allowed to say, 'I don’t like this, Mommy.’”( An imperfect step, but a step nonetheless.)

Not long after, she did exactly that. One day, I must have raised my voice, beginning to slip into a familiar pull of anger, because she looked up at me with her clear, trusting little face and whispered, “You look mean, Mommy.”

Her words hit me like a cold shock, snapping me out of it immediately. First came a wave of shame, then a flood of gratitude.

I felt proud of her, and proud of myself once I realized what had happened. I had empowered her to speak up for herself, even to me. I had given her something I never had: the safety to tell the truth without fear.

In the past, when I challenged my own mother, even gently, I was met with rage.
My daughter was met by a mother who paused. Who listened. Who softened.

That was the moment I knew the cycle was breaking.

Not because I had become “a perfect mother”, but because I had become a safe one to be with.

My mothering journey did not undo the past or magically fix the places in me that still ached. I still had work to do. But it gave me a new way forward.

In loving my daughters, I discovered a deep, indescribable, abiding love I had never known.

I learned that steadiness is not the absence of struggle; it is the willingness to stay connected through it.

I learned to acknowledge my mistakes without punishing them as the cause of it. Or punish myself for being human.

I learned how to name my own limits, how to apologize and repair when I got it wrong, and how to choose softness over shame.

I learned how to love without disappearing.

I learned that healing can happen when you are loved by your children in a way you once longed to be loved yourself.

And maybe most surprising of all, I learned how to mother the wounded parts of myself that never got what they needed. I am secure in being a good-enough mother.

I look at my daughters now - these luminous, wholehearted adult women, and I see not only who they are becoming, but who I have become beside them. I did not just raise them. They raised something in me, too.

So when Mother’s Day comes along, I focus on them. I feel deep gratitude for and cherish the love we have grown together. The laughter, the resilience, the tenderness woven into our bond. We are co-writing a new story. We are cartographers of healing.

I understand now that most of our mothers were never taught how to love themselves.

I realize how fortunate I am that my healing path has allowed me to turn toward the soft-eyed, frightened girl within who never dared speak up, and to mother her, too.

I thank the younger me, the twenty-five-year-old who was not sure where to begin but still made the vow to do things differently and chart a new course. I honor her for holding fast to that commitment, even when the path was unclear. Even when she did not get it all right, it made a difference.

And I thank the woman I have become for staying in the story. For continuing the work, for continuing to evolve and grow and do her part to contribute to the healing of my family’s generational pain. For becoming a mother who could offer what she did not receive.

Not to become a good mother (again, whatever that means), but a mother learning what it means to love : love her children, love the girl she once was, love the woman she is still becoming.

Wherever you are in your story, whether you are mothering others, mothering yourself, or simply learning how to receive the love you needed, may you know this:

You can begin again. You are worthy of great love. You can love differently.
You can choose to become the mother you needed, for yourself and your children.

Happy Mother’s Day, in all its complexity.
You are not alone.

From my heart to yours,
xo Mary

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Note:
I’m writing from the late-middle of the mothering journey. These reflections come from years of stumbling, healing, and slowly becoming. I don’t pretend to have it all figured out, but I’ve learned a few things about love, presence, and breaking the patterns I was given. I hope these words offer you a bit of company and encouragement on your own path.

Coming Next Week: Reclaiming Mother’s Day (May 11)

Mother’s Day used to reopen a wound each spring. Next week, on Mother’s Day, I’ll share how I slowly began to reclaim the day. Not by pretending it didn’t hurt, but by honoring both what was lost and also what I have received. It’s a reflection on grief, memory, and what it means to reclaim the day for yourself. I hope you’ll join me.

© Mary Thoma 2025 / All Rights Reserved