To My Daughters,

All the Versions of You I Have Loved and Failed

There isn’t a softer way to say this.

You deserved better than me.

Not the version of me that showed up when she could.

Not the version that loved you deeply but inconsistently.

Not the version that disappeared while sitting right in front of you.

A whole mother.

A present one.

A steady place to land.

And I wasn’t that.

I have spent years trying to understand why.

Autism.

Depression.

The trauma I carried from my own childhood.

The damage from the marriages I survived.

And all of those things are true.

But they are not your responsibility to carry.

And they are not something I can keep using to explain away the ways I wasn’t there.

At some point, reasons start to sound like excuses; especially to the children who needed you anyway.

So I won’t hide behind them here.

I wasn’t the mother you needed.

To the two of you who got less than half of me, I see it now in a way that keeps me up at night.

How I was physically there… but mentally somewhere far away.

How I moved through days like I was underwater,

missing things I should have caught, feeling things too late, responding in fragments.

I thought surviving was enough.

It wasn’t.

One of you…I felt you slipping long before you let go.

And I didn’t know how to reach you in a way that mattered. So when you chose distance, when you decided there wasn’t a place for me in your life, I didn’t fight it the way people might expect a mother to.

Because love, real love, sometimes looks like stepping aside when your presence only brings pain.

I stepped back because I could see it, I was part of what hurt you. And I couldn’t keep asking you to carry me just because I’m your mother.

There are nights I sit with a thought that doesn’t leave quietly:

How much lighter your lives might have been without me.

Not as punishment.

Not out of self-pity.

But as a kind of twisted, aching clarity.

If I could take away the impact of my absence, my inconsistency, the parts of me that fractured your sense of safety; I would.

If I could give you a version of your lives untouched by my shortcomings; I would do it without hesitation.

But I can’t undo myself.

So all I can do is face what I was… and what that meant for you.

To the one who stayed, who doesn’t punish me for my shortcomings, I don’t understand your kind of grace.

You saw me.

Not the version I wish I had been, but the real one.

The tired one.

The distant one.

The one who tried and still fell short.

And you stayed close anyway.

Not because I earned it.

But because your heart chose compassion over distance.

And that… that is something I carry with both gratitude and guilt.

Because your love did not come from my perfection.

It came in spite of my absence.

And to the daughter I am raising now.

You are getting a version of me that is fighting like hell.

Not healed.

Not whole.

But awake.

I hear your cries.

I come when you call.

I scoop you up and hold you close, trying to be the safety I didn’t know how to be before.

I watch your fears, and I try to soften them before they settle in your bones.

I stay present in moments that used to slip right through me.

I am trying, every single day, to do this differently.

To be different.

But I need you to know something that breaks me to admit:

There are still days I disappear.

Not physically.

But inside myself.

Days where my mind pulls me away, where I dissociate just enough to miss something small; a look, a moment, a piece of you I should have caught.

And even now… even trying this hard… I am still not everything you deserve.

To all of you

I loved you the only way I knew how at the time.

But love, when it isn’t steady, when it isn’t present,

when it disappears when it’s needed most; it doesn’t always feel like love to the person receiving it.

And that is something I have had to sit with.

Deeply.

Painfully.

Without excuses.

You deserved a mother who didn’t have to fight so hard just to stay present.

A mother who didn’t lose pieces of herself in the middle of loving you.

A mother who didn’t leave you feeling like you had to understand her, instead of just being held by her.

You deserved better than me.

But this is also true. None of it was because you weren’t enough.

You were never the reason I struggled to stay.

You were never too much.

Never too hard to love.

I was the one who didn’t know how to hold everything I carried and still be whole for you.

I don’t know what place I will have in each of your lives.

I don’t know if forgiveness is something I will ever be given or something I even deserve.

But I needed you to hear this without anything softening it:

I see it now.

I see you.

I see what I was.

And I see what that cost you.

And I am so, so sorry.