Brie Nicole Inked

Grieving is a strange thing.

There are days when I don’t even know if what I’m feeling can properly be called grief, because how do you grieve someone who wasn’t really in your life—and yet, somehow, was one of the biggest parts of it?

How do I mourn a relationship that never truly existed? How do I make sense of missing someone I spent so much of my life wishing I didn’t have to miss?

Lately, grief has felt less like tears and more like numbness. A strange quietness that settles over me without warning, leaving me moving through the motions of my days as though I’m watching myself from somewhere outside my own body. Then, without warning, the numbness gives way to anger. And the anger eventually softens into sadness. And sometimes all three exist at once, tangled together so tightly that I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

I am sad for the relationship I never got to have. I am angry because some part of me always believed there would eventually be a turning point.

Some magical moment when things would finally make sense. When she would look at me and see me. Really see me. When the years of hurt would somehow become something we could talk about instead of something that continued to sit between us. I carried that possibility for far longer than I probably should have.

Maybe that’s part of what makes this grief so complicated. I wasn’t only grieving her. I was grieving the possibility of her. The mother I kept hoping she might become. The relationship I kept believing might somehow be repaired. The version of my childhood I wished I could go back and rewrite. The version of myself who might have grown up knowing what it felt like to be loved by her without conditions.

And now that possibility is gone. There is no longer a someday. There is no longer a chance that things might change. Death has a cruel way of making everything final.

For years, I could tell myself there was still time. Even if I didn’t believe it would happen, I could still imagine that maybe one day she would reach across all the years between us and finally offer me something I had spent my entire life wanting.

Now I know she never will.

And there is something devastating about realizing that the door you spent your whole life standing in front of has finally closed, and you weren’t the one who got to decide when.

I’ve said I’m doing okay so many times over the past two weeks.

I’m fine.

I’m okay.

I’m getting through it.

Words I’ve repeated because they are easier than trying to explain the truth. The truth is, I’m not entirely sure how I’m doing. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel.

I’m not sure how grief is supposed to work when the person you’re grieving is also someone who hurt you deeply. When there are memories you wish you could forget sitting beside memories you wish you had. When love and anger exist in the same space. When compassion for someone’s suffering doesn’t erase the pain they caused you.

I keep thinking about how she died. That thought has been particularly difficult to carry. I think about how alone she was in the end. And despite everything. The anger, the resentment, the years of feeling unwanted. There is still a part of me that hurts knowing she died that way.

That is perhaps one of the strangest truths I’ve had to confront. Her hurting me didn’t make me incapable of feeling sadness for her. Her inability to love me didn’t make me incapable of wondering whether she felt lonely. Her choices don’t erase her humanity.

And somehow, acknowledging that doesn’t erase mine either. But then comes the guilt. The guilt for feeling sad about someone who caused me so much pain. The guilt for wondering if I should have felt differently or done things differently. The guilt in wondering if I should have tried harder. Given more of what I didn’t have. The guilt for mourning her at all.

I have had to remind myself that grief doesn’t require permission. I don’t have to justify why this hurts. I don’t have to make my grief neat enough for someone else to understand it. I don’t have to choose between remembering what she did to me and acknowledging that her death is painful. Both things can be true.

She was my mother. She was also the person who made me feel like I wasn’t worthy of being loved. She chose to adopt me. She chose to bring me into her life. And somehow, in the same breath, she made me feel unwanted in it.

That contradiction is something I’ve carried for most of my life. There is a particular kind of wound that comes from being told, directly or indirectly, that you are unwanted by the very person who chose you. Because adoption, at least in my mind, was supposed to mean something profound. You were chosen. You were wanted.

Someone looked at the world and decided, ‘I want you to be part of my life.’ But instead, I spent years feeling as though I had somehow failed to become the person she wanted me to be. Every criticism became another piece of evidence. Every rejection another reminder. Every moment of emotional distance another confirmation of the thing I was already beginning to believe about myself. Maybe I really wasn’t worth loving. It takes a long time to unlearn something like that. And sometimes I wonder if I ever completely will.

People talk so often about fathers and daughters. About the complicated relationships between girls and the men who were supposed to protect them. And I understand that pain in my own way. I have my own baggage there, my own things I’ve had to carry.

But the relationship I always wanted most was the one with my mother. I wanted the mother-daughter relationship I saw other people have. I wanted someone to call when I was overwhelmed. Someone who would be proud of me. Someone who could tell when something was wrong without making me explain it. Someone who would look at me and never make me question whether I belonged. I wanted the ordinary things. The little things that shouldn’t have felt extraordinary.

And perhaps that is the deepest grief of all. Not losing something I had. Losing something I never had the chance to have. There is no memory I can hold onto that makes the loss easier because there was never a safe place to begin with.

Instead, I am left mourning an absence that existed long before her death. And now I have to mourn the fact that the absence is permanent. There will never be a conversation that changes the past. There will never be an apology that arrives late but still arrives. There will never be a moment when she suddenly understands what her words and actions did to me. There will never be a chance for us to become something different.

And I think I’m allowed to be devastated by that. I’m allowed to be angry. I’m allowed to be sad. I’m allowed to feel nothing at all. I’m allowed to feel compassion for the way she died without rewriting the way she lived. I’m allowed to acknowledge that she suffered without pretending that I didn’t. I’m allowed to grieve her and grieve myself at the same time.

Because somewhere inside all of this, there is also a younger version of me who is grieving. The little girl who wanted her mother. The girl who kept hoping that if she tried harder, behaved better, became quieter, became smaller, became whatever she thought she needed to become, maybe love would finally come.

She deserved to know that her worth was never something she had to earn. She deserved a mother who made her feel chosen. Not just at the beginning, but every day after. And maybe some of this grief belongs to her, too. Maybe I’m not only grieving the woman who died. Maybe I’m grieving every version of myself who spent years waiting for something that was never coming.

And that is a painful thing to accept. Because moving forward doesn’t mean I’m suddenly okay with any of it. It doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven everything. It doesn’t mean the anger disappears. It doesn’t mean the sadness stops showing up in unexpected places. Moving forward simply means I have to learn how to carry what happened without allowing it to determine where I go next.

And right now, I don’t have some beautiful answer for how to do that. I’m figuring it out. Some days I will probably feel strong. Other days I may feel like I’m back at the beginning. Some mornings I might wake up and feel nothing, and some ordinary moment might crack something open inside me that I wasn’t prepared to feel.

Maybe that’s grief. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re mourning both a person and a lifetime of things that never were.

So am I fine?

I don’t know.

Am I okay?

Not really.

But perhaps I don’t have to be right now. Perhaps there is room for the uncertainty. Room to admit that this hurts. Room to sit with the anger and the sadness without forcing either one to become something more comfortable. Because the truth is, I can’t change what happened. I can’t change who she was. I can’t change the choices she made or the things she said or the years I spent wishing they were different. I can’t go back and give myself the mother I needed.

But I can give myself something now. I can give myself permission to grieve honestly. I can stop telling people I’m fine when what I really mean is that I’m surviving the day. I can stop trying to make this grief make sense. And eventually, slowly, painfully, I can begin to understand that moving forward isn’t the same thing as leaving everything behind.

Some things come with us. Some wounds become scars. Some questions never receive answers. Some relationships end without ever becoming what we desperately needed them to be. And sometimes healing means accepting that the closure we wanted from someone else may have to be created within ourselves.

I don’t know what moving forward will look like yet. I only know that I have to. Not because what happened wasn’t important. Not because it didn’t hurt. Not because I should be over it. But because there is still a life waiting for me beyond this grief.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough. Maybe I don’t need to be okay. Maybe I just need to keep breathing. One day at a time. One feeling at a time. One uncomfortable truth at a time. Until eventually, the weight becomes something I know how to carry. Until the grief no longer feels like the end of something, but the beginning of finally letting myself mourn what I deserved—and finally choosing not to spend the rest of my life waiting for it.