As a kid, I had one goal and one goal only: to earn my mom’s approval. I’d do almost anything to get the little half-upturned lip she’d show anytime she was pleased.
Full grins didn’t happen unless you were my sister or my brother or did something so impressive she couldn’t help herself.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me, or that it didn’t make me think there was something wrong with me. And don’t get me wrong, she was a good mom, and I love her, but she was hard to impress.
When she died a few years ago, I started to realize that her nature and a bunch of other things had nothing to do with me at all.
1. She never said “I’m proud of you” out loud
I graduated from college, and she nodded. I got promoted, and she said “That’s good.” I had my first kid, and she held him and told me his ears looked like my father’s.
Every milestone I hit, I waited for the words, and every time I got an echo of it but never the thing itself.
I spent years reading that as disappointment. Like no matter what I did, it wasn’t quite enough to cross whatever invisible line she had drawn.
After she died, my aunt told me a story I hadn’t heard. My grandmother never said those words either. Not once, not to any of her kids.
My mom didn’t withhold pride from me. She never learned how to say it. The language wasn’t in her vocabulary because nobody ever gave it to her.
2. She had opinions about my body and delivered them like it was nothing
I’d walk into her kitchen, and before I could put my purse down, she’d look me over. “You look heavy.” “That dress isn’t doing you any favors.” “Are you eating a lot of bread?”
She said these things the way a person talks about traffic. Casually. Like she was observing, not wounding.
I carried those comments for decades. They shaped how I saw myself in mirrors, in photos, in dressing rooms.
What I didn’t realize until later was that she weighed herself every single morning. She’d been thin her whole life and was terrified of losing that. The comments about my body were her own fear, pointed in the wrong direction.
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3. She’d change the subject whenever I shared good news
I called her when I got engaged. She said, “Oh, that’s nice,” and then asked me if I’d heard that the Hendersons down the street were selling their house.
I told her about a raise. She said, “Good for you,” and started talking about a recipe she’d seen in a magazine.
I stopped sharing things after a while. It seemed like she didn’t care.
But I’ve started to think she did care, and that was the problem. My mom married young, stayed home, raised three kids, and watched her own ambitions get smaller every year.
She didn’t know how to sit with someone else’s good news without it pressing on the parts of her life that had gone still.
Changing the subject wasn’t disinterest. It was self-preservation.
4. She treated my sister like a different species
My sister got the soft voice. She got the easy conversations, the calls that lasted an hour, the kind of closeness where they could sit together and not talk and it was fine.
I got the scrutiny. The follow-up questions. The look that said she was deciding whether to say what she was thinking.
For a long time I believed she simply liked my sister more. After she was gone and I had time to look at it without the sting, I realized my sister is exactly like her. Same temperament, same instincts, same way of moving through a room.
I’m more like my dad, and my mom never had an easy map for him either. She loved us both. She just had a shortcut with one of us that she never found with the other.
5. She’d go silent after a disagreement, sometimes for days
Three days of nothing after I told her I wasn’t coming for Easter. A full week of silence when I said I didn’t want her opinion on my parenting.
I’d call, and she’d answer with a voice so flat it barely qualified as a greeting.
I was sure she was punishing me. Training me to stop pushing back so she’d never have to hear a word she didn’t like.
But my mom grew up in a house where her father’s temper filled every room. Disagreement in her childhood led to shouting, or worse, not resolution.
Going silent was the only safe move she ever learned, and she carried it into every relationship she had, including ours. It was survival.
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6. She kept count of how often I visited
“I haven’t seen you in two weeks.” “Your brother was here Sunday.” “You used to come by more.” Every sentence read like a guilt trip, and for years I treated them that way. I’d leave her house irritated, feeling like nothing I did was enough.
After she was gone, I found a small calendar in her kitchen drawer. She had marked the days any of us visited with a little check mark. Not to keep score.
The marks were the only pattern in weeks that otherwise looked the same. She was lonely, and the visits were the architecture of her time.
She counted because the days between were long and empty, and I wish I’d understood that while I could still show up more.
7. She compared me to other people’s daughters
Linda’s daughter bought a house. Carol’s daughter lost all that weight. Did I see what Diane’s girl wore to the graduation? I heard these names so many times, and every mention felt like the same message: why aren’t you more like them?
But she wasn’t ranking daughters. She was ranking mothers. Every comparison was her checking her own work against the results she could see across the street or at PTA meetings.
Linda’s daughter’s promotion meant Linda had raised a successful kid, and my mom wanted to know if she’d done the same. The measuring was always about her.
8. She corrected me in front of other people
I’m telling a story at Thanksgiving, and she cuts in: “That’s not how it happened.”
I’m explaining to my aunt how I handled a situation at work, and she says, “Well, what you should have done is,” right there at the table, in front of everyone.
It made me smaller every time. I stopped talking at family dinners for a while because what was the point?
Looking back, I think the corrections were aimed at the room, not at me.
She needed the people around her to see that she had raised someone capable, and to her, a correction proved she was still shaping me, still involved, still the mother who knew best. It was her résumé on display, not my inadequacy.
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9. She had to control every holiday, every gathering, every plan
I offered to host Christmas once. She agreed, then called every guest herself to confirm the time, showed up two hours early, rearranged my kitchen, and swapped my stuffing recipe for hers. By the time people arrived, it was her dinner in my house.
I took it personally for years. I thought she didn’t trust me to do it right.
But my mom’s life got smaller as she got older. The kids moved out. My dad handled the finances. Her friends thinned.
Holidays were the one corner of her world where she was fully in charge, where nobody questioned her authority, and the results were visible on every plate. Letting go of them meant losing the one role that still made her feel essential.
She was a whole person I only met after she was gone
I was too close, too caught in the pattern of reaching for approval and coming up short to realize any of this while she was alive. It took her absence to give me the distance to see her as a person instead of only my mother.
She had her own wounds, her own fears, her own unfinished business that she carried into the way she loved me. Understanding that isn’t the same as excusing it, and it doesn’t erase what it did to me.
But it did stop me from believing the story I’d told myself for forty years, which is that I wasn’t enough. I was. She was carrying things I couldn’t see from where I was standing.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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