"I have searched for my mother’s love in all corners of the world." -Annie Ernaux
Dear Inklings,
This essay will take you about 10 minutes to read, but took me months to write, and years to process. It’s not one I could have written before this year. As though to prod me onward, I serendipitously read a few mother-related essays and books within a short span of time. These all inspired and gave me courage:
Relationships with our mothers are often complicated, strewn with a desire for acceptance and love. For those of us who have also, as Annie Ernaux wrote, “searched for our mother’s love in all corners of the world,” I hope this essay speaks to you.
With Love,
“I’m sorry for what I did to you when you were little.”
I was studying for a masters degree in marital and family therapy when my mother said those words to me for the first time. She’d called me down from my room in the house she and my dad moved to when I was in college.
She asked me to join her on the sofa—a green recliner brought over from my childhood home. The colour had faded over the years, but it matched the pea-yellow-green walls I found so atrocious.
I stood.
In tears, voice wavering, my mom went on. “I was too hard on you. It hurt you, and I know that now. Maybe you can forgive me; maybe you can’t. I still have to tell you.”
She didn’t know why she was so strict, she went on, why she needed to be so controlling. She told me about her own childhood of neglect. “I really was always proud of you,” she said.
I could never tell.
“I told everyone at church how proud I was. Ask anyone.”
Why couldn’t she have told me?
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
Still, I stood.
“Don’t you have anything you want to say?”
I shook my head.
“We should communicate. You can tell me. I won’t get mad.”
Years of messaging to the contrary sealed my lips. “Is that all?” I asked before retreating to my room.
“I read about the difficult, anxious relationship of an English woman with her adoptive mother. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t setting my story against hers, she writes. It was my survival from the very beginning. She writes about adopted children, about the absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of their lives. A crucial part of their story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. But I think it can sometimes be even more ambiguous for children who aren’t adopted; who talks about the bombs in their life story? No one. They don’t suspect an erasure, and here begins another, desperate fight, for the right to doubt.”
— Hila Blum, How to Love Your Daughter
My mom and me
Except for what I assume is a happy early childhood from home videos, my relationship with my mother has been contentious for most of my life. One of my recurring laments growing up was, “You don’t understand me”—one she hated hearing.
I wanted to be understood, to be heard.
She didn’t know how to hear me. “You are too sensitive,” she often told me.
We seemed to function on wildly different wavelengths, speaking different languages—exacerbated by generational and cultural differences. She, a Taiwanese immigrant, and I, her American-born daughter.
As I grow older, memories become fuzzier like grainy photographs losing a little more detail along the river of time. But I remember long nights standing at the foot of my parents’ bed. Long lecture sessions for whatever I’d done wrong that day to deserve it. My dad would be asleep. And my mom would alternate between glaring at me and lecturing. The only light came from a small lamp on her nightstand. In the night, it cast long, grotesque shadows along the walls, the ceiling, my mom’s face. Mirrors lining their bed frame looked beautiful in daylight, but only added to the horror in the dark. My sleep-deprived brain distorted her visage into a gargoyle.
Sometimes she would have me face the wall instead. I grew familiar with the textures on the wall—the cracks and wrinkles—the way the light fell and created shadows in the tiny grooves depending on the time of night or which light was switched on in that room. My mind would wander to distract from blows and screams, painting worlds within those caverns on the wall. 2AM makes for a vivid, if somewhat delusional imagination. It was my world, and I pretended if I just concentrated hard enough, I could shrink and fall right into the canyons I pictured on the wall.
My first therapist shocked me by saying I’d suffered child abuse.
How could things so normal and everyday be abusive?
Today, I can admit it was. They continue to have a lingering impact that I still have to work through. When I mess up, my mom is still the critical voice I hear in my head.
And
(because humans are gloriously messy and complicated and full of nuance),
she did the best she could with the tools she had available to her.
Speaking of gloriously messy and nuanced, my mom is not a monster, though I definitely wrote those words in my diary once when I was younger. She is someone who gives and gives to others without hesitation. Countless people have told me how she changed their lives thanks to her support of them through horrendous times. My mom sacrificed so much time and energy for congregants at church, caring for them, listening to them, counseling them.
But when people told me how lucky I was to have parents like mine, my brother and I always looked at each other, thinking, “That’s because you don’t live with them.”
The truth was, in giving so much to the church, I often felt like the sacrificial lamb.
Because I’ll never forget the time my parents spent hours counseling other couples, but when I asked if they would come with my fiance and me to do premarital counseling for a weekend, they said they were too busy. I broke down sobbing and asked them why they gave so willingly to others but wouldn’t do the same for me.
Yet when I am out in the world, I end up the beneficiary of my parents’ sacrifices. Those who have been touched by them over the years treat me with generosity and care because of them.
So, am I really losing? You know, I don’t know.
I spent much of my life making excuses for the way my mother treated me in my head and to others. Perhaps this is why even many of those who grew up with me only know a fraction of my story.
Most of the time, mothers love their children. They don’t set out to cause harm. By the time I’d reached adulthood, my mother often said, “Parents just want their children to be happy.”
Did my mom love me?
It was a question I asked myself a lot, especially by the time I got to middle and high school. I never felt like I was good enough. Each morning I prayed she wouldn’t get mad at me that day—the prayer went unanswered every day.
Now, I know my mom loved me the way she knew how. She just didn’t love herself, which spilled over to make it seem like she didn’t love me either.
Because I knew enough of her story to know she tried her best in a country she didn’t know, raising two children on her own while caring for a husband battling cancer. She fought her own demons. Some of them burst out and attacked others though she did not mean for them to.
I later learned my maternal grandma—who helped raise me and whom I only ever knew as my sweet wàipó who comforted me when I cried and brought me to K-Mart to pick out toys, who gave me my first diary—treated my mom horribly and still acted with disdain toward her—because of her physical disability. There were wounds there I would never be able to fully perceive, going back generations.
Once, my mom told me, “I talked to grandma about how I know she’s not proud of me and that’s why she never brags about me like she brags about my sisters. She just denies it. I said she didn’t have to deny it or pretend, but she doesn’t want to face it.”
But all that is not an excuse, only an explanation.
And I’m now old enough to realise the difference.
My grandma, baby me, and my mom in Taiwan
One therapy session, I brought up my mom’s apology from all those years ago—the one I couldn’t accept. I sat on my therapist’s velvet green couch, right on the cushion crack.
“She didn’t know what she was apologising for and I don’t think either of my parents will ever understand or acknowledge the impact of what they did,” I said.
We were talking about a peripheral issue: one that, to me, further highlighted my mother’s inability to perceive the extent of the damage she had caused.
My therapist has a way of speaking with a gentleness while conveying difficult truths. “You may have to come to terms with the very real possibility that you may never get the acknowledgement and closure you’re looking for. They may simply be incapable of it.” She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “What will you do if you never get it?”
It was a question I had to reckon with, consider if I could make my peace with.
Even so, I found some redemption in our relationship along the way, despite skirting past the past. Only during conflicts did the truth burst out, revealing the unhealed wounds:
The emotional volatility that kept me guessing. The shaming. The sudden temper outbursts that had me ducking from thrown objects but trapped by ingrained obedience and fear.
Those memories were embedded into my marrow, unacknowledged.
“I made mistakes, but I was not that bad,” became a repeated refrain whenever these conflicts arose.
Then there was gaslighting—claims that things I remembered vividly had never happened.
Scars would reopen.
Deepen.
Everything came to a head one month early last year. I wrote a long, detailed email to my parents, where I laid out nearly every grievance from childhood to the present day. I emphasised the persistent hurt. Ironically, the trigger wasn’t something they did to me; it was to someone else I loved. But it reminded me so much of how they were with me, and I was determined not to see it play out again.
I didn’t expect anything. It was meant as a final “fuck you” before cutting them out of my life indefinitely.
Their responses shocked me.
My mom apologised.
My father, who had never acknowledged how he didn’t stop the abuse or protect me, also apologised.
I said I still wanted space. They respected my wishes, and we completely stopped interacting for the better part of last year until I was ready.
East Asian immigrant parents don’t have a stellar reputation for respecting their children’s boundaries.
Mine learned to. It marked the beginning of a true reconciliation—built on openness and honesty.
No more silence.
Ten months ago, I believed our relationship destroyed. And I didn’t care. Their reactions made me reconsider, because being in relationships with messy people—especially family, is messy, grinding work. What matters to me is a willingness to compromise and change.
Five months ago, we started talking again. Cautious as I am, I’ve nevertheless seen a change come over my mom that I think, this time, is lasting.
Ten years ago, I was not ready to have the conversation my mother wanted to have, nor do I believe she was truly in a place she could receive it. Sometimes, healing never comes. Some mothers never apologise.
But sometimes healing begins after thirty years.
Sometimes, a mother says, “I’m sorry.”
About Me: I’m Tiffany, a literary fiction, fantasy, and memoir author. My writing has been published by The Cultivation Project and Renewal Missions. I’ve been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order my books here or here.