Brie Nicole Inked

There is a particular kind of grief that is difficult to explain when the person you are mourning was supposed to be your mother. Because how do you grieve someone who spent so much of your life making you feel as though your existence was an inconvenience? How do you mourn the person who was supposed to teach you what unconditional love felt like when, instead, so much of what you remember is disdain? There are no neat instructions for this kind of grief. No appropriate sequence of emotions. No simple way to reconcile the fact that I can mourn someone who, in so many ways, made me feel as though she had never wanted me at all.

I think what hurts most is that I never wanted anything extraordinary. I wanted a family. I wanted a mother. I wanted the simple, ordinary things that other children seemed to receive without having to ask for them. I wanted someone to look at me and see a daughter—not a burden, not an obligation, not an extension of someone else, but me. I wanted to feel chosen.

And perhaps that is why, in some quiet corner of me, I am still six years old.

I can still remember the little girl who was so incredibly happy to finally have a family. She believed in the magic of being chosen. She believed that adoption meant someone had looked at her and said, I want you. She believed that maybe this was where the loneliness ended. Maybe this was where she finally belonged.

Only to grow older and learn that she had not really been chosen for herself.

I was told that the reason I was adopted was because of my brother.

There are some sentences that do not leave you when you hear them. They settle somewhere deep, somewhere childhood was supposed to be safe, and they quietly rearrange the way you see yourself. For a little girl who had spent so much of her life longing for a family, discovering that she had been an afterthought was devastating in a way I did not have the words to understand then.

I only knew that something inside me had cracked.

And maybe that little girl has been carrying that fracture ever since.

This is what makes grief so confusing for me now. I don’t know how to mourn someone who hurt me. I don’t know how to hold sadness for a person whose presence so often made me question my own worth. I don’t know what I am supposed to miss when so much of what I wanted from her was something I never truly received.

I cannot pretend there was a beautiful relationship hiding beneath the difficult one. I cannot manufacture memories that do not exist. I cannot turn cruelty into tenderness simply because death has made everything feel more complicated.

But grief does not require a relationship to have been good.

Sometimes grief is mourning what happened.

Sometimes it is mourning what never happened.

Sometimes it is grieving the person who existed while simultaneously grieving the mother you desperately needed her to be.

And I think that is the grief I am struggling to understand.

I am not only grieving her.

I am grieving the mother I kept hoping she would become.

I am grieving every birthday, every childhood moment, every ordinary milestone when some part of me still wanted her approval. I am grieving the little girl who kept trying to be good enough to finally feel wanted. I am grieving the years spent wondering what was wrong with me, what I could change, what I could do differently, what version of myself might finally earn the tenderness I had been waiting for.

And there is something unbearably painful about realizing that perhaps there was never anything wrong with me.

Perhaps I was simply asking the wrong person for love.

But knowing that does not make it hurt less.

People sometimes speak about grief as though it belongs only to beautiful memories. The ache of losing someone who loved you deeply, the unbearable absence of someone whose arms felt like home. But grief is not always that clean. Sometimes it is ugly. Sometimes it is contradictory. Sometimes you can miss someone and still remember every reason you needed distance from them. Sometimes you can love someone in whatever complicated way remains and still acknowledge that they did not love you the way a mother should have.

And sometimes you grieve because you never stopped being the child who wanted them to.

I wish I knew what I was supposed to do with that.

I wish there were a name for this kind of loss. For losing someone who was supposed to be your safe place but never became one. For mourning someone whose death closes a door you spent your entire life standing in front of, still waiting for it to open.

Because now there is no possibility of reconciliation. No future conversation. No chance that one day she might look at me and finally understand what her absence, her words, her disdain did to that little girl.

There is only the finality.

And I think that is part of what makes this so difficult.

I have to grieve someone I never got to have.

I have to grieve a mother who existed in title but not in the way my heart needed her to.

I have to make peace with the fact that some wounds will never receive an apology, some questions will never receive answers, and some childhood dreams will never become memories.

Maybe I am allowed to grieve that.

Maybe I am allowed to cry for the mother I wanted even if I cannot cry for the mother I had.

Maybe I am allowed to feel angry and heartbroken in the same breath.

Maybe I am allowed to say that she hurt me and still mourn her.

Because grief does not erase what happened.

And forgiveness is not a requirement for mourning.

I think I am beginning to understand that I don’t have to make her into someone she wasn’t in order to grieve her. I don’t have to rewrite my childhood. I don’t have to pretend she loved me perfectly. I don’t have to make the story prettier just because it ended.

I can tell the truth.

She was supposed to be my mother.

I wanted her to love me.

I wanted a family.

I wanted to feel chosen.

And I was hurt by the person who was supposed to protect that little girl.

All of those things can be true at once.

So perhaps grief, for me, will not look like longing for her.

Perhaps it will look like finally turning toward that six-year-old girl and realizing that she deserved to be chosen for herself all along.

Maybe I can hold her now.

Maybe I can tell her that she was never too much, never unworthy, never the reason someone could not love her.

Maybe I can tell her that the family she dreamed of should never have been something she had to earn.

And maybe this grief is not only about losing the mother I had.

Maybe it is about finally allowing myself to mourn the mother I needed—and then, somehow, learning to become the safe place that little girl spent her whole life searching for.

I don’t know how to grieve her yet.

I don’t know if I ever will.

But I know I am allowed to grieve.

Even when the person I lost was the person who taught me what it felt like to feel unwanted.

Even then.

Especially then.

Because grief does not ask whether someone deserved our tears.

It simply arrives.

And sometimes, all we can do is let it sit beside us while we learn how to breathe around the shape of everything we never had.