The Inheritance of Being Unloved
“You will have a daughter just like you, and you’ll understand my pain.”
My mother said it as though I were a curse waiting to be passed down, as though loving me had been the longest punishment of her life. She spoke of my future daughter as if she were a sentence, a little girl who would arrive carrying all the things my mother could never forgive in me.
But I wonder, Mother, did you ever consider that you were once a little girl, too? That you were barely old enough to understand yourself when you became responsible for another life? You were so young when you became a mother, perhaps still a child yourself, handed a responsibility you had never learned how to carry.
But I was a child, too.
I remember being little, standing in the kitchen with a drawing clutched between my hands. I had spent the afternoon coloring it, carefully staying inside the lines, convinced that if I made something beautiful enough, perhaps I could make you happy with me. I remember waiting for you to look at it, waiting for your face to soften, waiting to feel like somebody’s little girl. I didn’t know then that I would spend years waiting for the same thing.
And then there was my father, or rather, the space where a father was supposed to be. An empty chair at a table I never knew how to set for two. I grew up with questions that had nowhere to go, wondering what it felt like to be someone’s daughter without having to wonder whether they wanted to be someone’s father.
And then there were the men.
You opened the doors of my childhood to people who had no business being there. You let them enter my world, and I was left to carry the things they made me feel long after they were gone. I needed a mother to notice that something was wrong, to recognize that a little girl was losing her sense of safety. But you did not seem to notice until the hurt began to reach you.
Eventually, I hated almost every man, even the ones who had done nothing to me. I could not understand how something that was supposed to feel safe could make me so afraid. I wondered why nobody had thought to protect me before I learned to protect myself.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped being a child.
I learned how to read a room before I learned how to understand myself. I learned when to stay quiet, when to apologize, and when to swallow my feelings because there was already enough sadness in the house. I became familiar with responsibilities that belonged to adults, learned to carry conversations I was too young to understand, and found myself comforting people who were supposed to be comforting me.
I was growing up while everyone else was busy growing older.
There is something particularly cruel about being a little girl who knows how to recognize everyone else’s sadness but has no idea what to do with her own.
I became my own emergency contact, my own comfort, and my own witness. When there was nowhere left to put all that hurt, I began turning it against myself. I hurt myself because I did not know how to make the pain inside me understood. I carried feelings so enormous that sometimes I could no longer recognize the person living beneath them.
There were days when I did not know how to exist inside my own mind. I could love someone desperately and feel abandoned in the same breath. I could be laughing one moment and drowning in emotions the next. I wanted reassurance but hated needing it. I wanted someone to stay, but never quite believed they would.
You called me difficult. You called me too much.
But, Mother, I was a child trying to survive feelings I had never been taught how to understand.
You had your own storms, your own battles, and your own mind that sometimes made the world difficult to live in. But you were so consumed by what was happening inside you that you never seemed to understand what was happening inside me. Your struggles were real, but so was the childhood I had to live through because of them.
I needed you to be the adult in the room. Instead, I became one.
“You will have a daughter just like you, and you’ll understand my pain.”
But what if I do?
What if she has my temper, my endless questions, and my tendency to feel everything as though the world were ending? What if she cries over things other people cannot see, laughs too loudly in quiet rooms, and reaches for my hand even when she has done nothing wrong? What if she looks at me with the same eyes I once used to search your face for approval?
Will I remember that you called these things unbearable?
Get Kenaimy Seo’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Will I look at her and see a burden, or will I see a little girl who has no idea how difficult the world can be and make it my life’s work to keep it from becoming difficult inside her own home?
Because I think that is what hurts the most, Mother.
Perhaps you were too young to know how to raise a child. Perhaps you were too immature to understand the responsibility of loving someone whose entire world revolved around you. Perhaps you were too immature to recognize that a child should not have to become emotionally independent simply because her mother cannot be emotionally available.
Perhaps you were too wounded to recognize that you were wounding me.
But I have spent so much of my life trying to understand what made me so difficult to love, only to realize that a child should never have to become easier to deserve it.
I was never asking you to be perfect.
I wanted to be young.
I wanted to worry about homework and silly little crushes. I wanted to come home with stories that did not have to be filtered through the weight of your emotions. I wanted to make mistakes without feeling as though the world would fall apart. I wanted someone to tell me that I did not have to figure everything out just yet.
I wanted to be seventeen, or twelve, or seven, without feeling as though I had already lived a lifetime.
And perhaps one day, when my daughter is standing in front of me with tears in her eyes, I will recognize the little girl I used to be.
I will hold her.
I will believe her when she tells me someone has made her uncomfortable. I will never ask her to make room for someone who makes her feel unsafe. I will not sacrifice her peace to preserve an adult’s comfort. I will teach her that her emotions are not an inconvenience, that she does not have to apologize for needing reassurance, and that she will never have to compete with my pain to receive my love.
I will let her be little.
I will let her be loud, difficult, emotional, curious, and completely unfinished. I will let her have a childhood that does not require her to understand mine.
I will not make her responsible for the things I have yet to heal.
Not because she has earned it. Not because she has been good. Not because she has finally learned how to be quiet.
But because she is mine, and because she is here.
And maybe that is when I will finally understand your pain.
Not the pain you promised me I would inherit, but the pain of knowing that you once had a daughter just like her.
A little girl who brought you drawings from the kitchen. A little girl who thought your smile was the sun. A little girl whose father was missing, whose childhood was interrupted, and whose heart was far too young to understand why the person who was supposed to protect her sometimes became another person she needed protection from.
A little girl who grew up so quickly that she forgot there was supposed to be a childhood between being born and becoming a woman.
A little girl who did not want to be strong. She just wanted someone to be stronger for her.
And the saddest part, Mother, is that I think I spent my entire childhood waiting for you to become one.
