They Weren’t Withholding. They Didn’t Know.

There’s a kind of young parent I keep meeting lately. She’s thoughtful, spiritually alive, doing the kind of conscious inner work I remember reaching for in my thirties. She loves her children with an intentionality that makes me take a deep breath. And she has that certainty I recognize from my own younger years… the kind that comes when you’ve worked hard for what you know and you can finally feel the ground steadying beneath you.

I see her everywhere now, and I feel two things at once. Admiration. And a quiet, aching recognition.

Because I was her once. Not exactly her, our generations are different, our vocabularies are different, but the certainty.

That I recognized completely.

I want to write to her today. And to everyone who loves someone like her. And to everyone who once was her, and has since had the ground shift beneath them in ways they never saw coming.

My mother was not a warm woman. Heavy handed, short tempered, and the wooden spoon was always nearby somehow. My dad was worse. He wore the belt.

There were no I love yous. No softness I could find or recall. Love looked like a roof and food on the table and a door that locked behind them when they left for work, which they did, every day and night, leaving me to a house and an older sister who had her own wounds and nowhere to put them but on me.

I was a latchkey kid in the truest sense. Alone was just another day in the life of growing up.

For years, as a young adult, I questioned everything about who I was. The void I felt to my core, I understood as something done to me. In today’s language, I would have called it withholding. And I placed most of that blame on my mother, because she was the one I needed warmth from, even when she could not offer it. It was the only story that made sense of the ache.

Then just recently I asked her directly.

Mom, why can you say, I love you now so easily, but never when I was little and growing up?

She didn’t hesitate.

“Because it would never have occurred to me.”

She wasn’t being cruel, and she wasn’t dodging the question. She was telling me the truth as she’d always known it. She had lived her whole life inside a different understanding of what love was for, what a mother was supposed to be, what strength looked like.

What I once felt as absence, I can see now as a different kind of love. One built in another time, shaped by conditions I never had to live through, spoken in a language I didn’t recognize as care.

She wasn't withholding, though it took the loss of my own children to finally see it.

She didn't know.

And here is where it came back around for me.

When my own children estranged, what undid me wasn’t only losing my girls. It was what their leaving made me see.

Because I had done the same thing to my own mother. Not identically, nothing ever is, but I had been hell bent. Hell bent on being nothing like her, doing nothing the same way. And in all that conviction, I had kept her at a distance for years.

Certain I was right. Certain she had failed me.

And I held that certainty like it was the truth. Until the day I learned what certainty costs. You cannot hold another person in blame and judgment for years without falling out of step with your own soul.

When I was at the bottom of my estrangement… raw, falling apart, carrying a grief I had no idea how to hold, I went to her. To the mother I had held at arm’s length for years. A child of the Great Depression, youngest of six, who had known scarcity her whole life and still showed up, with nothing left and no one ever supporting her.

She had every reason to close the door on me. To say what so many wounded parents feel they have the right to say…

Now you know.

What goes around comes around.

You did this to me first.

She didn’t.

She stood in the remnants of the pain I had caused her, and she let me off the hook for all of it.

Not because it hadn’t hurt. But because she loved me in the only way she had ever known how.

She was not a bad person failing "the right" standard. She was a person living inside the only standard she had ever been given. Vulnerability, in her world, was not connection. It was abdication. Emotional expression was not love. Authority was love. Structure was love. Sacrifice was love.

The quiet, unannounced kind that expected nothing back and named itself nothing at all.

The standard changed.

It always does.

One generation learns sacrifice. The next learns emotional attunement. The next will learn something neither of them could see.

Not because we failed. Because consciousness keeps moving. It moves in a spiral, not a straight line. We circle back to the same wounds again and again, each time from a higher altitude, until we can finally see what we couldn’t see before.

I’m not asking you to minimize what happened. I lived it too.

I was a conscious parent. I want to be clear about that, not to defend myself, but because it matters deeply here to the truth of what I’m about to say.

I read the spiritual texts. I meditated. I sat with my own childhood and traced every pattern back to its root, and then I broke the ones I could identify. I was emotionally present with my daughters in ways my own mother could not have imagined.

I said I love you, freely, daily. I apologized when I was wrong. I asked how their day was and how they felt and what they needed, and I wasn’t performing it. I meant it. I built my whole motherhood around getting this part right.

And I did get it right. So much of it. For so long.

And I had the relationship to prove it. The closeness. The laughter. The phone calls that went long, the conversations that went deep. I looked at what I’d built with my girls and felt something I had never quite allowed myself to feel before.

Relief.

The quiet relief of believing I had finally outrun what came before me. I broke it. The cycle ends here.

And then it didn’t.

I won't walk you through all the details here. But I will tell you that when it came, the distance, the silence, the door that closed with the calm finality of a decision already made…

I was not prepared.

I had prepared.

And I was not prepared.

Conscious parenting and soul work are not the same thing.

They overlap. Sometimes they even look identical from the outside. Both create more awareness. Both create more connection. Both interrupt inherited patterns and help us show up differently than the generations before us.

But one is focused primarily on how we relate to our children. The other is focused on how we relate to ourselves. And life has a way of eventually revealing the difference. Neither our parents nor our children are carrying our wound for us.

We are.

And the wound is patient. It is deep and it is many. Layered, integrated, woven through generations in ways we can’t always see or identify. Because we didn’t arrive here alone.

Over the years, I began noticing that this wasn’t just my story. The same pattern kept appearing in different forms, in different lives, until eventually I could see a shape beneath it.

There is a shape to this. A map I’ve watched people find their way through, not around. A human journey that doesn’t begin with estrangement and doesn’t end there either. Estrangement is usually somewhere in the middle, the rupture that finally makes the invisible visible.

Most people don’t move through these stages in order. We move through them in loops, returning again and again as life deepens what we can see.

At its simplest, it moves through four movements: pain, protection, passage, wisdom.

Most us don’t see ourselves at the beginning. We place ourselves further along, in the places where understanding already feels present and insight already feels complete. That’s part of the protection too.

You may recognize yourself in it.

You may be closer to the beginning, or the threshold, than you think.

The consciousness that makes today’s young parents so beautifully, deliberately present is the consciousness that was forged in the experience of not having it.

The love that comes out of that forging is real.

But so is the original wound that made it necessary.

And if that wound hasn’t been directly met, not managed, not worked around, not translated into better parenting practices, but actually entered, it doesn’t dissolve.

It waits.

And here is what estrangement has taught me, again and again, watching it move through the lives of the people who find their way to this work:

It is one of the most ruthlessly effective conditions for making the invisible visible that I have ever witnessed.

You are going to walk into the wisdom phase of your life.

That’s not a threat or a warning.

It’s just true.

At some point, life turns you around. Something is lost, or ruptures, or goes silent in a way you didn’t choose. And the questions that were always underneath the surface…

Who am I beneath the role, what did I carry that I didn’t know I was carrying, what was real and what was a story I told myself so I could keep going.

Those questions stop being optional. Estrangement has a way of bringing it all together. Of accelerating what was always coming.

The parents in this community know that. They arrived desperate… not enlightened, not ready, not looking for transformation. They were looking for their children. And they found something they didn’t expect. Not instead of their children. Alongside the grief of that loss.

A door. And the door opened inward.

What’s on the other side is not what you feared. It isn’t proof that you failed.

It’s your Self. Fully inhabited. For what may be the first time.

My mother built part of the bridge. I built part of the bridge. You are building part of the bridge now. And somewhere beyond what either of us can see, your children will build the next section too.

And someday they may look back, the way we are looking back now, and understand that the ones who came before them, imperfect and limited, were never the obstacle.

They were part of the path.

The wound was never handed down to punish us. It was generational, and it keeps moving through us until we meet it where it actually lives.

That is how consciousness moves.

That is how we find our way home.

With you in this,

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What we blame, we repeat. What we understand, we transform.

~ Inspired by The Path of Emergence.

If something in this stirred a quiet yes in you, that’s the threshold. You don’t have to be ready for the whole journey. You only have to be willing to take the first step.

I open the First Threshold to small groups a few times a year. You can join the waitlist here, and I’ll reach out when the next one opens.

Not ready for that step yet? Stay close. The door will still be here.