Before She Became Your Mother, She Was A Woman

We live in a generation where there is so much awareness.

We are learning about ourselves, our childhood experiences, our attachment styles, our triggers, our wounds, and the ways our past has shaped the people we have become. We are learning to recognise unhealthy patterns, establish boundaries, process our emotions, and break cycles so that our children do not have to experience the things we experienced.

We have access to books, therapy, conversations, resources, and language that help us make sense of things we once struggled to explain. We can finally name some of the things that hurt us. We can identify what was missing, what should have been different, and what we need to do to become healthier versions of ourselves.

And I think that is beautiful.

There is something liberating about finally understanding that some of the things we struggle with are not character flaws, some of our reactions are learned, some of our fears have histories, and some of the things we believe about ourselves were things we were taught, directly or indirectly, by the people and environments that shaped us.

But as I have continued to think about our healing journeys, I have found myself asking a question.

In our pursuit of understanding what happened to us, have we made enough room to understand what happened to the people who raised us?

This is not an attempt to excuse the pain they caused us. It is not an invitation to dismiss our experiences or pretend that the things we endured did not matter.

Rather, I want us to consider a perspective we may not always have the opportunity to explore.

I want us to talk about our mothers.

More specifically, I want us to talk about the women they were before they became our mothers.

Before She Became Your Mother, She Was a Woman

Before she was somebody's mother, she was somebody's daughter.

She was a girl who had a childhood, a young woman who had ideas about her future, and a person who probably imagined what her life would look like.

She had preferences. She had things she wanted to do. She had things she hoped to become.

Perhaps she wanted to go to school, become a nurse, start a business, travel, or build a life in a place different from the one in which she grew up.

Perhaps her dreams were much simpler. Perhaps she wanted a peaceful home, a loving husband, children she could raise with tenderness, and the freedom to make decisions about her own life.

Whatever those dreams were, they mattered to her.

Every woman has an inner world, even when the world around her never makes room for it.

But what happens when the life a woman imagined for herself is not the life she gets to live?

What happens when her parents die before they can give her the opportunity to pursue an education? When poverty forces her to abandon her ambitions? When she is married off before she has had the opportunity to understand herself, explore her interests, or decide what she wants from life?

What happens when she marries a man she does not love because she has been told that this is her best chance at security? Or when she marries a man she loves, only to discover that the life he promised her is not the life they eventually build?

What happens when, year after year, she has to adjust, sacrifice, endure, and make peace with circumstances she never imagined for herself?

We do not always ask these questions because we meet our mothers in the middle of their stories.

We meet them when they are already mothers.

We know them as the women who tell us what to do, correct our mistakes, prepare our meals, enforce the rules, and make decisions about our lives. We know their expectations, their temperaments, their strengths, and their weaknesses.

But how much do we know about the girls they once were?

How much do we know about the things they wanted before responsibility became their daily reality?

How much do we know about the lives they imagined before life began making its own demands of them?

And how many of us have ever thought to ask?

Some of Our Mothers Never Married the Men They Loved

I keep returning to this thought.

Some of our mothers never married the men they loved. They endured the men they married.

Of course, this is not every woman's story. Some of our mothers married the people they loved and built beautiful lives with them. Some found love after marriage. Others made the best of complicated circumstances.

But for some women, marriage was less about choosing a life they desired and more about accepting the life available to them.

Perhaps the decision was made by their parents. Perhaps they had very few alternatives. Perhaps they believed that a woman's future depended on finding a husband, and that a difficult marriage was still preferable to the uncertainty of having no husband at all.

Perhaps they loved the men they married but gradually discovered that love alone could not give them the marriage they had hoped for.

And so they stayed.

They stayed because of the children. Because of financial dependence. Because of religious convictions, cultural expectations, or fear of what people would say. Because they had nowhere else to go. Because leaving was not a choice they believed they could afford to make.

Some stayed because they hoped things would change.

Some stayed because they had been taught that a good woman endures.

And some stayed because, by the time they began to question their circumstances, they had spent so much of their lives surviving that imagining a different life felt almost impossible.

Now, imagine what it might mean to spend years living a life you did not fully choose.

Imagine having dreams you never pursued, needs you learnt to suppress, and disappointments you never had the freedom to acknowledge.

Imagine becoming so accustomed to putting yourself last that you eventually stop asking what you need.

What happens to a person who has to keep living without having the opportunity to grieve what she has lost?

I wonder how many women became mothers while carrying disappointments they had never been given the space to process.

I wonder how many entered motherhood already exhausted by the demands of being someone's daughter, someone's wife, and someone's idea of what a good woman should be.

And I wonder how much of that unacknowledged grief followed them into the homes they eventually built.

When Her Unlived Life Meets Yours

Now, let us consider something uncomfortable.

Perhaps your mother had dreams she never got to pursue.

Perhaps she wanted an education she never received, a career she never built, or a freedom she never experienced.

Perhaps she spent years asking for permission to make decisions you now make without a second thought.

And then she had you.

You grew up in a different time, with different opportunities. You had access to education she could only have hoped for. You learnt about boundaries, emotional health, self-awareness, and personal development. You began to understand that you could choose your career, decide what kind of relationship you wanted, and imagine a future beyond the limitations that shaped her own.

You began to explore possibilities she never knew existed.

And perhaps, instead of celebrating every opportunity available to you, she struggled to understand your choices.

Perhaps she called you proud when you began to express your opinions.

Perhaps she thought you were becoming disrespectful when you started questioning traditions she had never been allowed to question.

Perhaps your desire for independence felt like rejection to a woman who had spent her life measuring a woman's goodness by how much she could accommodate others.

Perhaps she struggled to celebrate the life you were building because, somewhere within her, your freedom reminded her of the freedom she never had.

Could it be that, sometimes, a daughter's possibilities bring her mother face to face with her own disappointments?

Could it be that seeing you do the things she once wanted to do reminds her of the life she did not get to live?

Could it be that some mothers struggle to understand their daughters not simply because they do not want them to grow, but because their daughters are growing in directions they were never permitted to explore?

I want to be careful here. A mother's resentment, criticism, or controlling behaviour can have many causes. We cannot assume that every difficult mother is jealous of her daughter or that every disagreement is rooted in an unrealised dream.

But I think these are possibilities worth considering.

Because sometimes, the tension between a mother and daughter may involve more than the disagreement taking place in the present.

Sometimes, it may also involve the contrast between two lives: the life one woman had to accept and the life another woman is beginning to discover she can choose.

And when we do not understand that contrast, we may keep fighting over the surface of things without ever understanding what lies beneath them.

The Grief She May Never Have Learnt to Name

We often talk about trauma, emotional wounds, and the ways unresolved pain affects our relationships.

But I wonder whether we sometimes forget that grief does not only come from losing a person.

Sometimes, we grieve the life we thought we would have.

We grieve the opportunities we never received, the choices that were taken away from us, the relationships that did not become what we hoped, and the versions of ourselves we never had the opportunity to become.

There is a particular kind of sadness that comes from looking at your life and realising that some of the things you once wanted may never happen.

And it can be especially difficult when the people around you expect you to be grateful for the life you have.

Imagine a woman who wanted to become a teacher but never had the opportunity to complete her education. Imagine that she married young, had children, and spent decades caring for her family.

Perhaps she loves her children deeply. Perhaps she would do many things again for them.

But does loving her children mean she never grieved the life she might have had?

Does being grateful for her family mean she never wondered what it would have been like to pursue her own ambitions?

Does fulfilling her responsibilities mean she never felt the weight of all the things she had to put aside?

We must make room for the complexity of human experience.

A woman can love her family and still grieve the life she did not live.

She can be grateful for her children and still feel exhausted by the sacrifices motherhood demanded of her.

She can appreciate the life she has built and still wonder about the person she might have become under different circumstances.

These feelings do not automatically make her ungrateful, selfish, or unloving.

They make her human.

But what happens when a woman has never been given permission to acknowledge those feelings?

What happens when she has been taught that a good mother must always be selfless, that a good wife must endure, and that expressing dissatisfaction with her circumstances means she does not appreciate her blessings?

Where does all that unspoken grief go?

We cannot know the answer in every individual case. But unresolved pain can influence how people relate to themselves and others, especially when they have little support in understanding or processing it.

Sometimes, it comes out as anger.

Sometimes, as bitterness or constant criticism.

Sometimes, as an inability to celebrate another person's happiness.

Sometimes, as an insistence that everyone else must endure what they endured.

And sometimes, it is passed on through the very expectations they believe will prepare their children for life.

Not necessarily because they want their children to suffer, but because they have never had the opportunity to examine the things they learnt to accept as normal.

When Pain Becomes a Pattern

This is where I think our conversations about the mother wound need to become more nuanced.

We have become more aware of the emotional pain that can come from a disrupted, neglectful, or unsupportive relationship with a mother or primary caregiver.

We are learning to recognise what happens when our emotional needs go unmet, when affection feels conditional, when our feelings are dismissed, or when we grow up feeling that we are never quite enough.

That awareness is necessary.

A child should not have to spend adulthood repairing the damage caused by the people who were supposed to care for them. A child's need for affection, safety, affirmation, and emotional connection is not unreasonable.

But I think there is another layer to explore.

What if some of the things our mothers struggled to give us were things they had never received themselves?

What if a mother who could not affirm her daughter's worth had spent her own life believing that her value depended on how useful she was to others?

What if a mother who struggled to respond gently to her child's emotions had grown up in a home where emotions were dismissed, punished, or ignored?

What if a mother who demanded that her daughter sacrifice everything for a relationship had learnt, from her own experiences, that a woman's ability to endure was the measure of her worth?

What if she was repeating what she had learnt, without realising that it was something that needed to change?

Again, these possibilities do not explain every mother's behaviour. They are not diagnoses, and they do not mean that every painful experience has the same origin.

But they remind us that patterns are often learnt within relationships.

A woman may inherit beliefs about love from her mother, who inherited them from hers. She may pass those beliefs to her daughter, who grows up believing that this is simply how life works.

And unless someone begins to question the pattern, it may continue.

The daughter may enter a relationship believing that love means tolerating disrespect.

She may struggle to express her needs because she watched her mother suppress hers.

She may feel guilty for choosing herself because she grew up believing that self-sacrifice was the highest expression of womanhood.

Or she may become so determined not to repeat her mother's life that she struggles to distinguish between healthy commitment and the fear of being trapped in the same circumstances.

In trying not to become her mother, she may still find herself organising her life around the experiences she had with her.

This is one of the reasons awareness matters so much.

We cannot examine what we refuse to acknowledge. And we cannot change every pattern simply by giving it a name.

Sometimes, we must go further. We must ask where it came from, how it became normal to us, what it has cost us, and what we want to do differently.

But we must also remember that understanding a pattern is not the same as excusing the harm it causes.

Your mother's experiences may help you understand why she struggled to love you in the ways you needed. They do not change the fact that you needed that love.

Her pain may help you understand why she became controlling. It does not mean you were wrong to need room to grow.

Her sacrifices may help you understand her expectations. They do not mean you must sacrifice your wellbeing to prove that you appreciate them.

Two things can be true at the same time.

She may have been hurting, and you may have been hurt.

She may have done the best she knew how to do, and her best may still have left you with things to heal.

She may deserve compassion, and you may still need boundaries.

Understanding her story does not require you to deny yours.

Perhaps We Need to Ask Our Mothers Different Questions

I wonder what would happen if, beyond asking our mothers why they did certain things, we sometimes asked them about the lives they lived before us.

What did you want to become when you were younger?

What did you imagine your life would look like?

Was there anything you wanted to do but never had the opportunity to pursue?

What was it like growing up in your own home?

What did your parents teach you about marriage?

Did you feel you had a choice when you got married?

What were the most difficult years of your life?

What did you wish someone had understood about you?

Were there things you gave to us that you wanted to give yourself?

What do you wish had been different about your life?

Have you ever had the opportunity to grieve those things?

Perhaps we have spent so much time trying to get our mothers to understand our experiences that we have not always thought to ask about theirs.

Perhaps we have been so focused on the things they did wrong that we have not wondered about the things that happened to them.

And perhaps, for some of us, there are stories we have never heard because nobody ever asked the questions.

I imagine that some women would have beautiful stories to tell. Others might have stories filled with pain, disappointment, and decisions they would make differently if they had another opportunity.

Some might be willing to talk. Others might not know how to begin.

Some might welcome the questions. Others might become defensive, especially if they have spent years protecting themselves from feelings they do not know how to process.

We must allow for that too.

A conversation like this cannot be forced. It cannot be approached as an interrogation or an attempt to get a mother to confess to everything she did wrong.

And not every mother-daughter relationship is safe enough for this kind of vulnerability.

But where there is room for an honest conversation, perhaps we can begin with curiosity rather than accusation.

Not because the past no longer matters, but because we are willing to understand more of it.

And if our mothers cannot or will not have these conversations with us, we can still examine the patterns, seek support, and make intentional choices about what we carry forward.

We Can Honour Their Sacrifices Without Inheriting Their Suffering

I think one of the most important things we can do in our healing journeys is learn to hold compassion and accountability together.

We can acknowledge that our mothers lived in circumstances different from ours.

We can recognise that some of the choices they made were shaped by limitations we may never fully understand.

We can appreciate the things they sacrificed, the ways they showed up for us, and the opportunities they worked to make available to us.

And we can still be honest about the things that hurt.

We do not have to choose between seeing our mothers as victims of their circumstances and acknowledging the harm they caused.

They were human beings with histories, limitations, choices, and responsibilities. So are we.

Perhaps our mothers did not have access to the language we now have. Perhaps they never learnt how to process their emotions, communicate their needs, or recognise the patterns they were repeating.

Perhaps they were trying to build healthy families with the only understanding of relationships they had ever known.

That deserves our consideration.

But we must also recognise that the fact that something was normal in one generation does not mean it must remain normal in the next.

We can be grateful for the sacrifices our mothers made without believing that suffering is the price we must pay for love.

We can respect their resilience without romanticising the circumstances that required it.

We can acknowledge their pain without making it our responsibility to repair everything they could not.

We can learn from their lives without making their choices the blueprint for ours.

And perhaps that is part of what it means to break a cycle.

Not to become people who are ashamed of where we came from, but to become people who understand where we came from well enough to make different choices.

Before You Judge Her, Consider Her Story. Before You Excuse Her, Remember Yours.

Dear Eve, I want you to understand that this conversation is not about asking you to feel guilty for recognising the ways your mother hurt you.

You are allowed to tell the truth about your childhood.

You are allowed to acknowledge the affection you needed but did not receive, the words that wounded you, the expectations that overwhelmed you, and the ways you had to adapt to survive your environment.

You are allowed to grieve.

You are allowed to establish boundaries, even when you understand why someone struggles to respect them.

And you are allowed to choose a different life.

But perhaps, as you continue to heal, you can also allow yourself to become curious about the woman who raised you.

Not just the mother who corrected you, disappointed you, or failed to understand you, but the woman who existed before you knew her.

The woman who had dreams.

The woman who had fears.

The woman who may have been trying to make sense of her own life while raising you.

The woman who may have been carrying grief she had never learnt to name.

The woman who may have loved you deeply but struggled to give you some of the things she had never learnt how to give herself.

You may discover things that deepen your understanding of her. You may discover things that make you sad. You may discover that her story is more complicated than you imagined.

And you may discover that understanding her does not automatically change the relationship you have with her.

That is okay.

The objective is not to manufacture a particular outcome. It is to make room for a fuller understanding of the people we are, the people who raised us, and the patterns that connect our stories.

Because perhaps healing is not only about learning to identify what went wrong in our lives.

Perhaps it is also about developing the capacity to see the people involved in those experiences as human beings, without denying the consequences of their actions.

Perhaps we can become more aware without becoming less compassionate.

Perhaps we can break patterns without despising the people who passed them down to us.

Perhaps we can acknowledge the sacrifices of one generation while making different choices in the next.

And perhaps, where it is possible and safe, we can begin conversations that allow us to know our mothers beyond the roles they occupied in our lives.

Before she became your mother, she was a woman.

She had a story before you became part of it.

You have yours too.

And understanding both may help you decide what deserves to be carried forward, what needs to be healed, and what ends with you.

A little reflection for you, Eve:

Have you ever thought about the life your mother might have lived if her circumstances had been different?

What do you know about the dreams she had before motherhood, the disappointments she experienced, or the choices she wishes she could have made?

If it is safe and possible, perhaps there is a conversation worth having.

This is not to erase your pain or to excuse what happened. It is to understand more of the story.

Because, sometimes, the beginning of a different kind of relationship is a question we have never thought to ask.

With Love,

Oluchi.

Connect//Heal//Thrive