Why Didn't I Ever Feel Good Enough for My Mom?

The weather has been really warm and humid lately.

The kind of early July days that makes me want to stick my head in the middle of a Wisconsin winter. Warm enough that you start sweating before you make it your car in the morning. But just the right amount of warm in the evening to want to spend all your time gazing at the horizon from your deck.

I've been spending most evenings down by the pond, finally giving attention to a part of our property that's mostly been surviving instead of being cared for for the past I don't know how many years.

Because...life.

For a long time, simply keeping everyone alive felt like enough. This summer finally feels like there's a little room to begin noticing some of the things that have patiently waited for us.

The biggest project has been the magnolia.

Or maybe I should say...

finding the magnolia.

Every spring it blooms with soft pink flowers that seem almost too delicate after a Wisconsin winter.

By June, though, it almost disappears beneath a tangle of wild rose.

Not the kind you're probably picturing.

When someone says rose, I think of flowers. Soft petals. Something beautiful enough that you instinctively lean toward it.

This isn't that kind of rose.

This rose has vines that are thick after years of growing undisturbed. They twist around every branch they can reach, weaving over and under each other until it's almost impossible to tell where one begins and another ends. Long thorns catch my sleeves every few minutes, and despite all of that growth...

I don't think I've ever seen it bloom.

The first evening I went down there, I thought I was clearing one overgrown vine.

The next evening I realized there were dozens.

Then I found vines wrapped beneath those vines.

Some had wound themselves around the magnolia so many times that I couldn't simply pull them free. I had to stop, follow them backward, and slowly work out where they began.

It has taken so much longer than I expected.

Not because cutting is difficult.

But because untangling always takes longer than cutting.

What surprised me most wasn't how much wild rose there was, though that was surprising.

It was how difficult it became to tell where one plant ended and the other began.

From a distance, they looked like they were one tree.

The magnolia didn't grow thorns.

It had simply lived beneath them for so long that it became hard to tell the difference.

And once I saw that...

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Not about trees.

About people.

Really, for me, about my mom.

Have you ever noticed how quickly your mind fills in the blanks when people seem distracted, send a shorter text than you'd expected, or a conversation ends in way that leaves you wondering...what did I do wrong? Or...

Are they upset with me?

Was I too much?

It's interesting how quickly we sometimes arrive there.

I've noticed I still do at times.

And the space that I have been all too quick to arrive at for most of my life has been...it's because I'm not good enough.

I wanted a relationship with my mom.

I really did.

When many teenagers naturally begin pulling away from their parents, I remember wanting almost the opposite.

I wanted to be closer.

I wanted conversations.

Connection.

I wanted to feel chosen by someone I loved so much.

So I kept trying.

I thought if I could explain myself better...

need less...

be easier to love...

maybe things between us would finally change.

They never really did.

For a long time, I thought her rejection meant something about me.

That I wasn't enough.

That I was too much.

That if my own mom didn't seem to want to know me the way I wanted to know her, the way other peoples moms seems to want to know them...well...

maybe there really was something wrong with me.

Standing beneath that magnolia, I found myself wondering something I'd never quite put into words before.

What if I've mistaken her rejection...

for me not being good enough?

They're not the same thing.

But they have grown so close to each other, so close they almost joined...that they are so easy to mistake as one and the same. But, just because they grew together...

doesn't mean they belong together.

What if the feeling of not being good enough isn't the same as actually not being good enough?

What if I feel that way because I learned what rejection felt like before I was old enough to understand it wasn't always about me?

And those are very different stories.

A thing that really surprised me about clearing the magnolia wasn't cutting the vines, or even untangling what I could.

It was what happened afterward.

I thought they'd simply fall away.

They didn't.

The weight of them was still resting on every branch.

In some ways, the weight felt even heavier once they'd been cut.

Before, they'd been held up by the very tree they were slowly covering.

Now someone had to carry that weight away.

Armful by armful.

And I think healing feels a little like that too.

Not because understanding instantly makes everything lighter. In fact, sometimes it does the opposite. Sometimes, for the first time, you can actually see what you've been carrying.

The stories.

The shame.

The deep belief that someone else's inability to love you the way you needed somehow became evidence that you weren't lovable.

The more I uncover the magnolia, the more I notice things I couldn't see before. The smooth bark hidden beneath years of vines. The branches that kept reaching toward the light anyway.

The places where the thorns had woven themselves so tightly around the tree that, for a while, I couldn't tell they weren't part of it.

Maybe that's what I've been learning too.

Not every story I believe about myself began with me.

Some of them grew so slowly and so closely around me that I forgot they were different. They weren't actually about me. But I was impacted by them.

I don't know what your story is.

Maybe it wasn't your mom.

Maybe it was someone else.

But if you've spent years wondering why you feel rejected so easily...why you work so hard to prove yourself so you can be loved...or why "not enough" feels like such a familiar place to land...

I wonder if it's worth asking one gentle question.

Did that story actually begin with me?

Or did it grow around me so closely to me for so many years that I never knew they weren't mine?

-Julia

A gentle place to begin

If this left you wondering whether there might be more to the story you've been telling yourself, that's exactly why I created my free What's the Real Problem? Quiz.

It isn't meant to diagnose you or tell you who you are.

It's simply a place to begin putting words to patterns you may have been carrying for a very long time.

→ Take the free quiz