I miss my mom.
Our relationship was complicated. We lacked true connection—it was push and pull. She could be overbearing and smothering at times, and I often felt a need to escape. I was expressive, restless, and non-conforming. We weren’t a natural fit. I longed for her approval but never got it. What I received instead was criticism and a persistent sense of being misunderstood.
She played the role of wife and mother, but I sensed she wanted something more. I remember her telling me once—just a few years before she passed—with a kind of playful disbelief, how annoyed she’d been: eight months pregnant, coming home from work, and finding my dad sitting in the living room, reading the paper—waiting for her to start dinner.
It’s been three years since she passed. I spent a lifetime looking for closeness and only caught a glimpse near the end. She didn’t speak the language of shared emotions or deep conversations. She often didn’t know how to hold space. Still, she made bold moves —leaving Norway to build a life in New York City while raising a daughter she hadn’t planned for, caught between two cultures.
Despite it all, she was my mother.
My father, much older, had passed away decades earlier, as had the only aunt and uncle I had in the States. Visits to Norway grew infrequent. Even the once-familiar Norwegian neighborhood in Brooklyn—where she moved back when my father became ill—began to fade.
Grief is complicated.
I think of her often, and I also carry the imprint of what was missing between us.
The Mother Wound
The mother wound isn’t often talked about, but it shaped so much of who I became. It wasn’t neglect or overt abuse—it was more subtle, harder to name. As a highly sensitive child, I was deeply affected by emotion, energy, and unspoken tension. I needed warmth, safety, and emotional presence.
We were wired differently. She saw my expressiveness as disobedience, my curiosity as defiance. I felt everything.
She wanted things contained.
I internalized the disconnection as something wrong with me. The emotional distance left a psychological fissure—a quiet but persistent ache for understanding, affection, and safety.
And she had deep secrets—always keeping things close. It created a wall between us. The weight of her own suppressed and unprocessed pain, fear, and shame had to go somewhere, and at times, I became the target.
I was the black sheep—challenging traditions, never quite fitting the mold. I became the outsider. Phrases like “What did you do wrong?” or “Shame on you” were staples in our house.
As a child, I internalized distress through intense stomach pain and anxiety. I was very expressive—laughing, crying—there was always a feeling.
By the time I was a teenager, I was often in trouble—getting zeros for talking too much in class, though my teachers found me somewhat amusing. I was sent to the principal’s office, which eventually became an unspoken agreement—I helped grade papers.
I didn’t tolerate boredom well. I’d play hooky and take the NYC subway to Washington Square Park, wander Central Park, or lose myself in record bins in Soho. Movement and music became a kind of sanctuary.
One of my earliest memories of feeling unsafe happened in first or second grade. Two boys in my class began harassing me. I froze. I couldn’t find my voice. Eventually, I just stopped going to school.
Instead, I hid in the laundromat across the street—pretending my mother would return any minute. I waited there, day after day, until school let out. I knew I couldn’t tell her.
When the school finally called, she wagged her finger and said, “What did you do wrong?”
That moment carved something deep into me—fear, shame, and the quiet realization that home wasn’t a safe place to land.
My mother wound wasn’t about physical neglect. It was the absence of emotional refuge—the distance that left its mark. I innately explored a full range of emotionality, while my mother found comfort in black-and-white thinking and the guardrails of acceptable conversation. She didn’t need—or want—to understand things deeply. But depth was where I lived.
Approval was conditional. Comfort met with distance. Safety, with self-doubt. Love felt out of reach. She could be sharp, often critical—quick to judge, slow to comfort. Publicly, I knew how to perform: smile, behave, play the role. The performance mattered. But behind closed doors, the frustration seeped out. Her patience was thin, her inner life tightly guarded. She carried an invisible weight that no one else could see, and I felt like another demand she struggled to bear.
Still, there were sweet memories —baking cookies, licking the bowl, shopping, decorating for holidays. She dressed impeccably, was mindful of her weight, and cared deeply about appearances—even dressing up just to run errands. She never liked my go-to look: fitted jeans, a black t-shirt, and purposely tousled hair. I had my own style.
There was something odd, even disruptive, about my need to understand and feel things deeply in a world built on appearances. I watched her exhaustion—the weight of endless responsibilities she never questioned out loud—the cooking, the cleaning, the decorating, the gift-buying that often went unnoticed.
It was the expectation—this is what women did.
It planted a seed in me—one that would later lead me to carve out a different path..
Yet, for all the ways we clashed—for all the things I needed that she couldn’t give—I know now she carried burdens I’ll never fully understand.
In her own way, she loved me.
It just wasn’t always the way I needed.
Breaking the Cycle
Like most fathers of that era, mine was hands-off in parenting, but his presence was easy, warm, and full of charm. He loved jazz and was a self-taught man, always reading, with a deep curiosity about the world and a love of language he built on his own.
Somewhere in me, that seed took root—the drive to learn, to wonder, and to shape the world through words. Even as a child, I turned feelings into language.
I remember twirling around the living room as he sang, often fueled by a bit of whiskey. I once asked what was in the brown paper bag. With a grin, he whispered, “It’s Daddy’s medicine.” Later, I understood just how easily that medicine could go down.
He’d often tuck me in at night and read Aesop’s fables aloud—his voice calm and sweet. He took me to appointments, even to see a shrink once—something no one talked about back then.
At dinner parties, I preferred to hang out with my dad for more interesting conversation over chores in the kitchen.
By young adulthood, I saw the limitations placed on women—how marriage often seemed less like a choice and more like a role to fill. Most women I knew stayed within those lines. I quietly stepped outside them.
But I remember one friend’s mom who had carved out space in her home just for writing—a world that belonged only to her. That image stayed with me.
Maybe because I wrote too. As a child, it was my only outlet—a place to transcend.
What once made me the outsider became my strength. It made me question everything. It taught me how to be self-reliant—how to depend on myself.
And over time, I realized I was more like my mother than I ever wanted to admit.
At 19, I left New York on a whim and moved to California. The ocean, the open skies, the stillness—it all gave me space to breathe.
It became home.
And somewhere along the way, so did the words.
My mother once said, “Too bad you didn’t get your father’s language skills.”
But I did.
I write.
I wasn’t meant to follow in her footsteps.
I was meant to give voice to what went unspoken.
Related Reads:
The Missing Link: Family Secrets →
A closer look at what happens when buried truths rise to the surface—and how they shape identity.
Breaking the Cycle: How to Recognize and Heal Generational Trauma →
Learn how emotional patterns are passed down—and how to begin untangling them.
Wired Differently: ADHD? HSP? Or Just Me?→
A broader lens on neurodivergence, emotional depth, and early adaptation—and how they shaped the way I move through the world.
The Highly Sensitive Extrovert →
What happens when you’re wired for connection but overwhelmed by the intensity of life? A look at how sensitivity shaped my emotional wiring—and my survival strategies.
