Something Happened to Her: Mothers Who Can’t Love (and the Ones Who Learned To)

Hey Beloveds. It’s been a while.

It’s interesting. Lately my moments seem to slip straight into hours, and hours into days, without so much as asking my permission. Then out of nowhere I glance at my calendar, and what only felt like a handful of days has quietly become weeks. Sometimes life gets so full of healing itself. The business and the busyness. Moments so focused on creating, imagining, designing, learning, that it forgets to say out loud: you’ve disappeared. From so much of what matters. The community. The connection.

I can’t say I haven’t missed y’all. Missed this. Missed the particular kind of quiet that shows up when I finally sit down to write to community, how the whole room seems to lean in and listen too.

How have you been? How’s life treating you out there, in whatever weather you’re standing in right now? I hope this summer heat is giving you moments of relief too.

I’ve spent these last weeks in a wild amount of training, gathering wood for my own fire. And if I’m honest, some of that gathering came from watching how much life has been asking of people lately. Life has been especially challenging for the folks I love. And the community I journey with, so I’ve been mindful not to let my well run dry.

Forgive the silence. While it definitely felt like an absence, I’m hopeful it’s been a sweet preparation, for the wonderful things I’ve been building for this community, and for whatever you’ve been quietly building too. I hope you’re dreaming right now. I hope you’re creating something, even in the parts of yourself that only you can see. The inner work nobody claps for. That’s my hope for me. For you. And for all of us trying to stay soft in a world that keeps giving us reasons to harden.

Okay, so this next part has nothing and everything to do with what I just said. Bear with me, my mind took a little detour and I’m going to follow it.

I walked through the supermarket the other day. Just me and my cart. Each step a moment of gratitude that I was only one mouth to feed. In that moment, something in me celebrated every mother and father I passed, doing that quiet math behind their eyes as they moved down the aisle like they were playing chess. But this game nobody agreed to sit down at. No one wants to decide which bill gets paid this week.

When the other choice is which mouth gets fed. Each aisle becoming the moment of choosing and re-choosing. Humbly. I’m not carrying what they’re carrying. I know that much. But I stood there thinking about how much love it takes to keep showing up to that chessboard. Week after week. Year after year. Just to put something warm on a table. And it moved me past the receipt in my hand and into something much older and much deeper than the price of anything.

Because feeding a child is love. It is. And I don’t ever want to diminish the sacrifice it takes to do it well. And consistently. And without complaint. But standing there, I found myself wondering how many of us grew up believing that a full refrigerator meant we were fully loved. That if the lights stayed on and the plates stayed full, nothing else could possibly be missing. When the truth, the harder truth, is that food is only the floor. It is the first rung on a much taller ladder than most of us were ever taught to climb. And some of us were fortunate enough to climb every rung after it: finding real nourishment waiting at the top, the kind that feeds something other than the body.

And some of us never made it past that first rung at all. Fed and clothed and tucked in every single night. And still, somehow, quietly starving for something a full plate was never going to be able to give us.

That same tenderness followed me home, still sitting in my chest hours later, when I found myself scrolling, half looking for nothing in particular the way we do at the end of a long day. And that’s exactly when it happened.

A book stopped me cold, right there in these internet streets. Just the title, four words, laid a hand flat against my chest and pressed.

Mothers Who Can’t Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters, by Susan Forward.

I sat with that title longer than I meant to, phone still in my hand, thumb hovering, not scrolling any further. Because I know whose face that title calls up in some of us reading this. I know this isn’t my grief to narrate. My own mother’s love reached me a little bent, a little worn at the seams. The way love travels when it passes through hands that were never once given softness of their own.

But it reached me. I remember the day she raised her hand to correct. The way she’d been raised. It was the first. And final time. Spare the rod, spoil the child. I was 4 years old, maybe 5. And the terror in my eyes stopped her. A fear she recognized, because she’d felt it herself as a girl. In some other house. Long before I was born. She never raised that hand again. Later she told me about the rage that lived under her heart. The wound she carried that she had never asked for.

How she knew, in that gut way (a body sometimes knows things before the mind catches up) that she couldn’t pour her fire onto me without burning us both down to nothing.

So she set it down.

I got to grow up inside a space she made by setting it down. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.

But I didn’t come here today to teach. I came to lay something at your feet, one heart to a house full of hearts.

What This Book Is Asking Us To Feel

This book walks through the many rooms a mother’s pain can live in. The mother who can’t find the line between herself and her daughter. Who mistakes her child’s whole life for a second chance at her own. The mother whose wound hardened so completely around her own reflection that no mirror was left over for anyone else in the house. The mother who grips too tight because letting go (once) cost her everything. A mother who has spent every day of her life denying pain. Making sure it never happens again. Even at her child’s expense. The mother who was never mothered herself, and so reaches into an empty cupboard every time she’s asked to give. The mother who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stand between her child and the danger already living under their own roof.

Susan Forward writes about every one of these women, and here’s the mercy in her pen: she never once asks us to hate them. She only asks us to finally see them.

I want to see too.

But today my eyes also need to travel further back than any one woman’s story to see clearly.

Back past her mother. And her mother’s mother. Into rooms none of us were alive to stand in.

A Vision of Innocence

I don’t believe any mother is born wanting to destroy the life that grows inside her. Not once. Not ever. I need us to sit with that belief before I ask you to walk somewhere heavier with me. Because I won’t take you into the dark without a hand to hold on the way there.

Let us walk together.

Picture a woman whose body was never fully her own. Bought. Sold. Her children counted on a ledger like sacks of grain, before their feet had even learned to travel the ground beneath them. Picture the night that planted a life inside her. It might have been the gentlest hour she ever knew: love stolen in the dark between two people who cared for each other in spite of everything.

Or it might have been the most violent night of her life. From the outside, in the eyes of the world that claimed to own her. No one ever asked which. Her belly grew either way.

Life doesn’t ask permission to take root. Something moves in a woman’s body when it does. I have to believe that. Some door cracks open toward that small stranger no matter how they arrived. Something old and true wakes up in her. Whether the world lets her feel it safely or not.

Now picture her looking down into that baby’s eyes for the very first time. And knowing. Knowing, the way only a mother in that particular hell could know. That if she let this love grow the way love wants to grow. Wide open and reckless with devotion. It could be the very thing that destroyed her.

Because this child could be gone by sundown. Sold off to a stranger passing through on an ordinary Tuesday. No goodbye. No warning. No grave to visit and grieve at for the rest of her life. So what does a woman do with a love too large and too dangerous to hold at full size? She learns. Because she has to. To keep some of it back. Not because her heart was small.

But because her heart was too big to survive what the world would do to her the moment she let all of it show.

That’s not a broken woman handing down a broken habit like an old family recipe nobody remembers the reason for.

That’s a wound sewn straight into muscle and memory. Carried forward in the very hands that rocked the next cradle. And the next. And the next after that. An inheritance none of us asked for and all of us received.

Colonization doesn’t end the day the chains come off the body. It moves inside. It settles into the spirit. And stays there. Quietly rearranging how safe love feels. How much of ourselves we dare to hand over to another person. How loudly or how softly we let ourselves love out loud. This is some of what Brené Brown has spent her whole career pointing toward: that vulnerability is the birthplace of connection. And it’s also the first thing we barricade once we’ve learned, in our bodies, that what we love most can be taken from us without asking. Without warning. Without a single goodbye.

So when I look at my own mother now, even in the places that still ache, I try to look at her the way I’d look at any woman who survived something enormous. Because she did survive something enormous. Something happened to her. Something happened to her mother before her. And her mother’s mother before that. Back further than any of us have names or photographs to hold onto. And something happened to me too. In smaller ways. Softer ways. Ways I’m still learning to say out loud without flinching or apologizing for the saying.

I want to hold this next part gently, because I know who walks through this door and sits down at this table with me.

Some of you carry this exact bloodline of grief. This specific American wound stitched into your skin and into the rhythm of your own mother’s hands.

And some of you are standing beside us without that particular history. But you know displacement in other languages. Other borders. Other kinds of theft. And the lesson landed the same… no matter in what language it was taught in.

Wherever your feet are planted this morning, I believe this truth holds steady for all of us.

Something happened. To you. Or to the ones who raised you. Or to theirs before them. Back and back and back.

And it needs to be spoken about tenderly.

Not as an excuse for harm. As a door swinging open, finally, into understanding.

Back To The Book, Back To Us

When I hear someone spitting hatred, in a verse, in a comment section, in the careless way they move through a room without a shred of softness left for anyone else. I no longer ask what’s wrong with them. I ask, quietly, almost like a prayer: what happened to you. I try to ask it the way you’d approach a hurt animal. Gently. Not the way you’d level an accusation.

I believe, all the way down to my feet, that a person raised inside real love moves through this world differently. There’s no version of loving myself that leaves room for cruelty toward you. And here’s a truth I’ll hand you plainly. No dressing it up. The more I actually learned to love myself, the less I needed the gold. The shine. The accolades. The performance. The desperate need to be the brightest thing in every room I walked into.

Real love doesn’t need to outshine anybody else’s light. It actually makes room at the table. Pulls out a chair. Says, sit down. Eat. There’s enough here for all of us.

The hardest thing this book asks us. And it’s a hard ask. Is to say out loud that some mothers fed us. And housed us. And dressed us up nice for church. Made the outside of the house look just fine to the neighbors. And still couldn’t love us the way our bodies needed to be loved. That sentence costs something real to say. It cost me something just to write it here for us now. But I believe that’s the brave work waiting on this generation: telling the true thing even when it shakes the whole table.  Because silence has always cost us more than the truth ever could.

So I’m handing you this book today for a few reasons.

Maybe it’s your season to finally say the true thing out loud.

Maybe you’ve spent years believing yourself unloved, and this book will help you find love in places you just didn’t have the words for. Yet.

Either way, I hope it drops one more seed into whatever garden you’re tending.

It’s been exactly that for me.  Not only as a clinician, but as a woman who has watched so many of us, daughters and sons alike, learn how to love ourselves despite what happened. Or didn’t happen. In that very first pair of arms.

Wherever you are on this road, I see you. And I’m glad. Truly glad…that your feet are still moving.

With tenderness,

Doc Rain