For a long time, I carried my mother’s absence like a quiet ache.
It wasn’t the kind of grief that people asked about anymore, it was the kind that lingered after everyone else had moved on. The kind that became part of my reflection.
As a girl, I didn’t have the words for it. I just knew I was different. I knew there were things other girls learned that I had to figure out alone how to brush out my own tangles, how to sit with pain without a voice guiding me through it, how to pretend I didn’t notice the absence when Mother’s Day came around.
No one told me that the world looks at girls like me differently. That when you grow up without a mother, people start to assume things that you must be hardened, unteachable, incomplete. I started to believe them. I carried that belief into every part of myself until I could no longer tell where the loss ended and I began.
There was shame in that. A deep, unspoken shame that whispered you are unfinished.
That voice followed me into womanhood. It showed up in how I loved, in how I apologized for needing too much, in how I tried to become everyone’s something just so I wouldn’t be nothing.
But shame is a liar.
It took years and the slow, holy work of unlearning, to realize there was nothing missing in me. That what I lacked in guidance, God replaced with grace. That even though I was never taught how to mother, I had been mothered by something greater all along.
God had been raising me in His own way, through the people who showed up when I least expected it, through the intuition that never left me, through the strength that carried me long before I recognized it as my own.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped longing to be like everyone else and started learning to be like me.
I began to see that every wound had been an opening. Every silence, a lesson in listening. Every lonely moment, a space where God could speak. The girl who grew up without a mother became a woman who could mother herself, who could hold her own pain gently, who could create softness where none was given, who could teach others how to live through their missing pieces, too.
That is not shame.
That is glory.
Glory in survival.
Glory in softness.
Glory in still choosing love, even after life taught you loss.
There are days I still feel the ache of her, the questions I can’t ask, the milestones I’ll never share. But I no longer mistake that ache for emptiness. It’s just love, stretched across time.
And I’ve learned that love, in any form, is proof of presence not absence.
So when I think of her now, I don’t bow my head in sorrow. I lift it. Because her absence shaped the woman who learned how to rise without instruction. The woman who learned that grace could find her even in the gaps.
I no longer carry shame for what I didn’t have.
I carry gratitude for what I became.
Do not put shame where God has put glory.
