Your mother. Her presence, her absence, her wounds, her love, her failures. All of it became the template. The blueprint for what you expect from people, what you’ll tolerate, what you believe you deserve.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand that template. Where it came from. Why I keep running into it. How to stop carrying what she was never able to put down herself.

My Mom taught me that love is making someone else happy. That their happiness is a priority over your own.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I felt something was off for the first time when I was 14. I wrote my Mom a letter. I was dating a boy named Jon, and I wanted to be safe, so I asked if she would help me get on birth control. A different mother might have taken a breath and asked me to tell her more. She might have thanked me for trusting her enough to come to her at all. She would have asked questions first, about how I was feeling, about whether I felt ready, before making it about anything else. She would have talked to me about safety and made sure I felt respected. She might have even told me she was proud of me for being responsible enough to ask. Mine cried. She made it about her, about how her daughter was too young to be thinking about sex. I don’t remember her asking how I felt or why I thought I was ready. It became about her. And I became the one doing the soothing.

I didn’t understand what was happening in that moment. But I remember thinking, this doesn’t seem right.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties and early thirties that I started putting it together. My Mom doesn’t love herself. Doesn’t like herself. And someone who hasn’t learned to love themselves doesn’t know how to love anyone else, including her own kids. What she never showed me was that in her version of love, she was always the one being put first. She loved me, I believe that. But she loved me the way she wanted to be loved, not the way I needed to be. And there’s a difference between loving someone and knowing how to love them. So, when I sat at the kitchen table, a 14-year-old trying to be responsible, trying to reach out, trying to trust her with something vulnerable, I ended up doing what I had already been quietly trained to do. I managed her feelings. I soothed her distress. I made myself smaller so she could feel better. I didn’t even realize it then. That’s how well the lesson had already taken hold. I thought I was just being a good daughter.

That’s what this is about. Not a takedown. Not a therapy session. Something more complicated than both.

I want to write about what it means to love someone and not like them at the same time. To have empathy for someone and still be angry with them. To understand where someone’s damage came from and still feel the weight of what it cost you.

I also want to talk about healing. I think about it like a tree. The roots are everything that came before you. The damage, the love, the patterns passed down through generations of women who were just trying to figure it out, too. The trunk is you, holding all of it, the connection point between what you inherited and what you’re still growing. And the branches? Those are the places that need tending. Some branches you know about. Some you don’t find out until life moves through you like a storm, and suddenly there’s a crack you never saw coming. And it doesn’t have to be devastation that does it. Sometimes it’s joy. Sometimes it’s a promotion, a new relationship, a baby. Life-changing in the most beautiful ways can split a branch just as wide.

Being healed is real. I just don’t think it’s the finish line society makes it out to be, as if crossing it is where your “real” life begins. But it doesn’t exist.

There will be seasons where you feel it. Where you feel steady and strong and like the work you’ve done has actually meant something. And it has. That’s real too.

But then something changes. You meet someone new. You take a new job. You lose a friendship. You have kids. You fail at something you cared about. Something shifts, and suddenly there’s a wound open that you didn’t know was still there, or didn’t know existed at all. And the healing journey is present again, whether you were ready for it or not.

Being healed isn’t forever. It’s a season. And some of us will visit it many times over the course of a life, each time a little differently, each time with a little more of ourselves intact.

Some seasons the tree is full and reaching. Some seasons it’s barely holding on. Neither one means you failed. It just means you’re human and you’re still in it.

This is Still Becoming. It’s not a destination. It’s the ongoing, uncomfortable, sometimes beautiful work of figuring out who you are when you finally stop being just somebody’s daughter.

Welcome