Grief & being unmothered

A year ago I wrote about the moment grief hit me in the face at Christmas. I was standing in a supermarket aisle, listening to a family plan their Christmas, and something inside me broke open. The grief poured out right there in that aisle. I had lost my mum the year before.

Since then my grief has continued to move and shift. It has revealed things I could not have seen before about my loss and about feeling unmothered throughout my life.

The first grief happened when I was young. My mum was there, but she could not be emotionally present. She was raising me and my brother while grieving her husband. She had no support. She was living inside her own trauma while trying to care for two young children. As a kid I did not understand any of this. I only knew it as emotional loneliness and confusion.

I have come to realise that grief arrived again later, when the relationship between us never became the relationship I needed. I tried to find a place of safety with her, but it never fully existed, and the dynamic stayed difficult. That created its own kind of grief. A grief for the mother I longed for but never had.

And then came the final grief when she died. Losing a parent is a huge experience, but when the relationship has been marked by emotional distance, unmet needs, and longing, the grief becomes layered. It becomes a mixture of love and sorrow, understanding and confusion, compassion and pain. It becomes a grief not only for the person who has died, but for the relationship that never fully lived.

This year I have been breathing through all of it. Breathwork has been the place where these losses could be felt without fear. It has helped me see my mum as a woman shaped by her own wounds, rather than only as the mum who could not give me what I needed.

Something happens in breathwork that words cannot fully describe. The breath opens a doorway to the parts of us we learned to hide. It softens the edges. It dissolves old tension. It lets grief move instead of staying frozen. It brings understanding that goes beyond the mind.

The waves of grief still come. They are part of loving someone who was both present and absent. They are part of being an unmothered daughter learning how to mother herself.

If any part of this touches your own story, I want you to know you are not alone. Being unmothered, whether through absence, emotional distance, or loss, is a deep experience. It shapes us. But healing is possible. Softening is possible. Becoming your own source of safety is possible.

This past year has shown me that grief does not disappear. It evolves. It teaches. It asks us to grow. And through breath, presence, and compassion for ourselves and for the women who raised us, we can find a way to carry our mothers with us while also learning to let go.

I am still learning. Still breathing. Still healing. And step by step, breath by breath, I am finding my way back home to myself.

Mel