My mother wasn’t unloving—she was just raised in an era where parenting was about management, not connection

My mother showed up to everything. Every school play, every parent-teacher conference, every event that mattered. She drove us to appointments, made sure we were never hungry, and kept the house running with a competence I didn't fully appreciate until I tried to do it myself. She was present in every practical sense of the word. Nobody who knew our family would have called her anything but a good mother.

And she was a good mother. That's the thing I've had to sit with as an adult—both things can be true at once. She was good at the job of it. What she wasn't good at, or maybe wasn't capable of, or maybe simply wasn't taught, was the part underneath the job. The reaching in. The wanting to know what was happening inside me rather than just what was happening around me. The particular kind of presence that isn't about logistics.

I felt bad for noticing the absence of it. She did so much. How could I want more? But the wanting wasn't ingratitude. It was just the truth. There was something she couldn't give, and I felt it in small ways that I didn't have language for as a child, and have spent years finding language for as an adult.

She wasn't cold . She wasn't withholding on purpose. She was parenting the way she had been parented—practically, managerially, keeping the operation running. Connection, for her generation, wasn't part of the job description. Here's what I've come to understand about that.

I was managed more than I was known

There's a difference between a parent who keeps track of your life and a parent who is genuinely curious about your inner life. My mother knew my schedule, my grades, and my friendships in the most external sense. What she didn't ask about was how I actually felt about any of it. Whether I was happy underneath. What I was carrying that I hadn't said out loud. She wasn't incurious—she just didn't have a model for that kind of parenting. The generation she came from raised children by making sure they had what they needed and were prepared for what came next. The interior life of a child wasn't on the agenda. So it wasn't on hers either.

I learned to pretend to be okay rather than feel it

When you grow up in a household where emotions are treated as peripheral—where the important things are the practical things—you learn quickly to keep the emotional content to yourself. Not because anyone told you to. Just because there was nowhere for it to go. You'd bring it out, and it would meet with something efficient rather than something warm, so eventually you stopped bringing it out.

I became very good at presenting the functional version of myself. The version that was doing fine , managing well, not in need of anything that couldn't be provided practically. It wasn't dishonest, exactly. It was just adapted. The fuller version—the one that was uncertain, or sad, or needed to be held in some way—learned to stay mostly quiet. That adaptation followed me out of childhood and into every relationship I had afterward.

I spent years not knowing what I was missing

Alexis Cate, LCSW, writes that what makes emotional distance in a mother so complicated is that it often produces children who don't recognize what they lacked—because they never experienced the alternative. The unavailability becomes the baseline, and you assume everyone's experience was similar.

That was true for me. I didn't know I was missing emotional attunement because I didn't know it existed as a specific thing a parent could offer. I thought the way my mother engaged with me was just what parenting was.

It took watching other families—a friend's mother who asked follow-up questions, who noticed when something was off—to understand that what I'd grown up with was one version of parenting, not the only one.

I looked for her warmth in other places

Children don't stop needing what they need just because it isn't being provided. They just find other places to look. For me, that was certain teachers, certain friends' parents, and eventually certain friendships themselves. People who asked questions and waited for the real answer. Who made me feel like the interior stuff—the worrying, the wanting, the feeling—was worth attention.

I didn't understand what I was doing at the time. I just knew that some adults made me feel seen and others made me feel processed. I gravitated toward the ones who made me feel seen with an intensity that made complete sense once I understood what had been missing at home.

I get it more when I think about my grandmother

Tiffany Spilove, therapist and founder of Spilove Psychotherapy, writes that one of the most common generational patterns she sees is emotional suppression passed down when vulnerability was discouraged in the family of origin—daughters learn to bottle feelings rather than express them, and then parent the same way without realizing they're repeating anything.

When I think about my grandmother, it makes sense. She was a woman of her era in the most complete way—practical, stoic, not given to sentimentality. My mother learned from her what parenting looked like, and what it looked like was competent and functional and not particularly warm.

My mother passed that on to me without meaning to, the same way her mother had passed it to her. None of it was malicious. It was just the only template any of them had.

I used to feel disloyal for wanting more from her

For a long time, wanting more from my mother felt like an indictment of her. She did so much. Acknowledging the gap felt disloyal. What I've come to understand is that recognizing what I didn't get isn't the same as dismissing what I did. Both things are true. She provided. She showed up. She loved me in the ways she knew how. And there was something she couldn't give, and I felt the absence of it, and that's allowed to be true without canceling out everything else.

I had to grieve something I couldn't quite name

The grief for a parent who is alive and present but emotionally unreachable is a strange thing to carry. There's no clean loss to point to. No event to grieve. Just the accumulated awareness of something that was always slightly out of reach—the feeling that I could be known more completely than I was, that someone could be more curious about me than they were, that there was more available from that relationship than I was getting.

I've sat with therapists who helped me name this. The naming helped. Not because it resolved anything, but because unnamed things take up more space than named things. Once I had language for what I'd experienced, I could stop spending so much energy explaining it to myself and start actually processing it.

I notice how she shaped the way I ask for things

Or don't ask for things, more accurately. I learned early that needs that couldn't be solved practically weren't worth voicing. So I became someone who keeps the emotional content to herself and presents the resolved version of whatever she's going through. I'm better at asking now—it took years. But the instinct to not need things is still there underneath. I notice it most when something hurts and my first impulse is to handle it alone. That's not strength. It's just a very old habit.

I've had to learn what she couldn't teach me

She couldn't teach me to sit with my own emotions because she didn't know how to sit with hers. Couldn't model asking for help because she didn't do that either.

So I've had to learn those things from elsewhere. From therapy, from certain friendships, from paying attention to how people I admired moved through their emotional lives.

It's ongoing. But I try to hold onto the understanding that the gaps in what I was taught aren't permanent deficits—they're just things that have to be learned later, from different sources, in a different way.

I love her through a different lens now

Understanding where her emotional unavailability came from didn't excuse it or erase it. But it did change how I carry it. She wasn't withholding love. She was giving everything she had. The limit wasn't in her feeling—it was in what she'd been taught feelings were for, and what parents were supposed to do with them.

That reframe is a gift I've given myself slowly, over many years. I'm not angry at her the way I might have been if I'd stayed inside the childhood version of the story. I'm something more like sad for both of us—for the connection that was harder than it needed to be, and for the fact that she probably didn't even know what was missing. I don't think she ever did. That's its own kind of grief.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our "As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy .