Mother Wound

The Contract

This is not what I signed up for - to spend my life translating someone’s suffering into love.

They say before we are born, we choose our own destinies, but it seems like I skipped the living and went straight into my personal hell. An eternity doomed by a singular cry, a longing for something that is owed to me.

I did not agree to become fluent in pleasing before I learnt my own my name. I did not consent to measuring affection by tone, or learning that discipline is cloaked by silence. I was gifted everyday rituals, folded neatly and passed down as care, not knowing that unfinished grief hid between the creases. Not knowing that it was my inheritance.

I learnt early that love is labour. That listening is vigilance. That tenderness is something you earned by being small enough. Palatable.

I once believed that this was a unique experience. However, the older I grew, the more I began to recognise this pattern elsewhere:

In other women’s pauses. In the way apologies arrived before boundaries. In how honesty was the catalyst for conflict, and how bloody it could get.

In another life, I am still learning how to keep quiet.

In another, my voice bounces off of the corners of the Earth.

In another, I am the mother, holding a voice I am afraid to hear.

Somewhere else, she is learning the same lesson differently.

The Good Daughter

She learnt that silence was deliberate.

It sat at the dinner table with them, thick and watchful. It followed her down the hallway, pressing its ear against her bedroom door. To her, silence wasn’t the absence of sound; it was a presence that punished without explanation.

When she angered her mother, nothing was said. That was the lesson. No shouting, no raised hands, no clear crime. Just a withdrawal so precise it felt surgical. A job so clean, it ensured the perpetrator remains free. Unpunished.

Questions went unanswered. Smiles were never returned. Breakfast was served cold as a result of evaporated affection.

Introspection was her daily cadence.

Had she spoken too freely?

Was her tone too confident?

Did she laugh too loudly?

Maybe she asked for too much…

Her first diploma was in anticipation.

She read faces the way other children read books. She adapted to changes in mood before they even happened. Certification came once she understood that love returned faster if you erased yourself efficiently.

People praised her.

“You’re so mature!”

“She’s such a good girl!”

None of them asked what it cost.

When it was time for her to speak, her throat constricted; her voice remained coarse. All she could do was smile. Silence, after all, was supposed to mean peace. And even though her eyes spoke, no one bothered to learn their language.

The Honest One

She refuses silence, and they call it rebellion.

In this life, she questions things. She asks why affection feels conditional. She asks why anger is only to be expressed by some. Every question is received as an accusation, even when it isn’t meant to be one.

“That’s just the way things are!”

“Why can’t you just let things go?”

Honesty rearranges the room. Conversations end abruptly. Her words echo longer than she intends them to. She learns early that the truth hits like an earthquake and that arguments centred in it crack the foundation of trust.

Her mother tells her she is difficult. Disrespectful. Entirely too much.

She wonders why clarity is mistaken for cruelty.

Still, she speaks. Even when her voice shakes. Even when love feels like something she risks losing every time she opens her mouth. Her truth is expensive: it costs her softness, empathy and love. Her change is distance, tension and the grief of being misunderstood by the one who birthed you. Still she pockets it.

She knows that silence costs more.

The Mother

You promised yourself you would be different.

You catalogued the damage carefully, convinced that awareness alone would protect you. Advocate for you. Change you.

Until one day, you heard it.

A sharpness in your voice.

An impatience that doesn’t belong to the moment.

A familiar bark, inherited.

Still, you think you are better.

You pruned the sharp words.

You softened the silences.

You cut the edges.

You call it love.

What a twisted love.

The bark rises anyway.

It shifts.

It hides.

It punishes differently.

Your children shrink.

They bend.

They speak in codes.

You do not see.

You do not notice.

You cannot notice.

Traditions do not die in your hands.

They wash down.

Altered, reshaped, bleeding into new forms.

The core remains.

It survives your pruning.

It survives your care.

It survives you.

Long live the bark.

The One Who Left

The letter is never sent.

It lives folded inside a notebook, written in a careful hand. She left the house years ago; crossed cities, learnt new routines, curated a life that looks like freedom.

Still, the language followed her.

In the letter, she explains herself gently, as if pre-empting anger. She lists what she is grateful for before naming what hurt. She apologises for the pain she imagines her truth might cause.

“I needed space,” she writes.

“I needed to learn who I am without translating myself.”

She stops before the ending. There is no neat conclusion. Just an acknowledgement: leaving did not erase the wound, but it gave her room to stop mistaking it for love.

The letter remains unsent, not because she is afraid, but because it has already done its work.

The Fallen Angel

She stays, and everyone assumes she is fine.

In this universe, love and harm coexist so tightly they are indistinguishable. Her mother can be generous, funny, deeply protective. Yet still, there are moments when affection turns conditional and savagery arrives disguised as care.

She learns to hold contradictions without naming them. To defend her mother fiercely while quietly shrinking herself.

Leaving feels like betrayal. Staying feels like erasure.

She wonders if endurance is the same as loyalty. She wonders if love should feel like constant negotiation. There are days she almost speaks, and days she convinces herself that this is simply how closeness works.

The saddest part was not what she endured, but what it taught her to feel: sympathy for the one who hurt her. Because if a woman could not tend to the heart she had birthed, a heart that is an extension of her being, then she must have abandoned her own long before.

The Chorus

We did not sign up for this.

To be born already in debt.

To arrive living in situations we never prayed for, with grief we never earned.

To be handed silence instead of correction.

To be taught that love meant obedience and endurance meant holiness.

We learnt early how to kneel.

How to listen for footsteps in a house thick with mood.

How to swallow truth until it learnt to live in our bones.

Our mothers called it discipline.

The elders called it tradition.

God was invoked to keep us small.

But the spirit does not live where fear is worshipped.

We were told to understand.

We understood ourselves into disappearance.

And still, it was not enough.

When will we stop being repositories of unhealed pain?

Stop being the soft place where harm comes to rest.

Stop baptising cruelty in the language of culture.

When do we stop calling fear “respect” so no one has to change?

Our mothers did not mean to break us.

They broke us anyway.

That truth is not blasphemy.

It is fact.

Some of us learnt to survive by shrinking.

Some of us learnt to survive by burning.

Some of us stayed and learnt how to split ourselves: the obedient body and the watchful soul.

And some of us became mothers.

And felt the inheritance rise in our throats — a voice sharpened by hunger, by silence, by never being held — and had to decide whether to pass it on.

This is the severing.

Being loved did not save us.

Being good does not protect us.

Being quiet did not keep us safe.

We did not sign up for this.

So we lay it down: the silence, the debt, the inheritance… whatever comes after will have to learn how to live with our voices.

The Bark

I realise now that change does not arrive as an apology that fixes everything.

It arrives as a pause before harm.

As a question asked instead of an accusation.

As a voice that chooses not to repeat itself.

This is not what we signed up for; to carry the past unquestioned. And still, we choose something else.

Not perfection.

Not erasure.

Just the courage to speak in our own tongue, and to let the silence mean something new.

That silence followed me everywhere. It lingered over doors I had passed without noticing, over benches where no one ever stayed, over streets that seemed to breathe with memory. It was not empty. It was waiting.

I meet her somewhere ordinary.

A place people pass through without staying.

She sits beside me without looking, like this was arranged long before either of us arrived.

For a moment, we are just two women sharing quiet.

She breaks it first.

“I’m healed,” she says.

I nod, the way you do when you recognise a language you no longer have to translate.

“I’m free,” I say.

We don’t ask from what.

We don’t explain how.

The silence between us holds. It doesn’t lean in. It doesn’t wait to be earned.

She leaves without saying goodbye. I don’t watch her go.

This is not what I signed up for, and I no longer live as if it is.