Read this if you’re a mother or a daughter…

The most powerful gift my mother ever gave me did not come from perfect parenting, but from a deep, embodied knowing that she was going to be okay, and that I would be too.

Like most mothers and daughters, my mother and I have had a complicated relationship.

Like many eldest daughters, I spent years tracing my high functioning anxiety and performative & people-pleasing tendencies back to my relationship with my mother. I learned early on from her to scan, to anticipate, and to perform in order to gain safety, security, and success.

Like me, my mother also had a complicated relationship with her mother.

In many ways, my mother is just like me. One half black sheep, as adventurous as they come, finding her own way in life. One half small lamb— walking the world yearning for approval, security, and reassurance. The kind only a mother can give.

Growing up, I was often frustrated by my mother’s need for approval from my grandmother. I felt it made her anxious. And I felt that anxiety spill over onto me.

My mother loved me deeply. She wanted nothing more than for me to be “a happy, healthy, productive member of society,” which she would tell me often in a way that made me wonder what would happen if at one point I was not one of these things. I think that to her, this would mean I was ok. Safe. This would also mean she did ok. Being “okay”— or safety— as she learned it, was conditional, something you earned from achievement and acceptance from others.

My mother never really told me things like:
“You’ll be okay”
Instead she showed her care for me in critical “should’s” and fearful “what if’s”.

This is what she knew from her mother.

I am not yet a mother. But I am a daughter. And I am a perinatal and infant & early child mental health specialist.

The older I get, and the more young mothers I work with, the more I empathize with my mother.

Because I see this pattern with mothers and their babies everywhere:

Mothers who love their children ferociously— but are equally terrified of getting it wrong.
Mothers who believe that if they don’t stay on top of everything, something terrible might happen.
Mothers who confuse vigilance with protection.

& The unspeakable fear underneath it all:
What if my child isn’t okay?
& perhaps an even more unspeakable fear— what would that mean about me?

Here’s what I know as an infant and early child mental health specialist:
Our children quite literally borrow our nervous systems.
They shape their view of themselves and the world from what our nervous systems expect and anticipate.
The lens that we view ourselves and the world becomes the lens that we view our children, which then becomes the lens that they view themselves and the world.

This is a profoundly brave and vulnerable thing to look at:

If we hold a belief, consciously or unconsciously, that we have to get it all right to be good enough, suddenly we begin to look at our children worrying if they are ok. We find evidence that they might not be ok, and that becomes the self-concept our children develop.

The night before my grandmother died, I unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere became flooded with emotion.

Something cracked me wide open, and the reality hit me like a ton of bricks: my mother was going to lose her mother. And one day, I would lose mine.

Despite all the years feeling challenged by my relationship with my mother, I was flooded with anticipatory grief. Fear. A childlike panic inside my chest that I hadn’t felt in years. It pleaded desperately:

“AM I GOING TO BE OK?”
Would I be ok in a world without my mom?

That night, I called my mom in tears, with a vulnerability that I hadn’t felt comfortable showing her in years. To this day, I can’t come to any other conclusion other than that something bigger, more spiritual was pulling on us both to heal a deep generational wound inside my maternal lineage, and to have this conversation:

I asked her what it felt like to be losing her mother. I told her I couldn’t imagine losing mine.

And then, trying desperately to hold back tears, I asked her the question that had lived quietly in my body my entire life, the question that lives subconsciously in every child’s body their entire lives, and that subconsciously shapes their nervous systems:

“Mom, are you going to be okay?”

The words unlocked a tsunami of emotions. Like when you’re having a bad day and someone safe asks you how you’re doing and the space allows everything to spill out.
I remember the question caused my mother pause. And then she said:
"I am, Maggie. I’m going to be okay.”

Her words came out in a viscerally honest tone— like maybe she was realizing and claiming a truth for herself for the first time in that moment. But she embodied it. It was real. She believed she was going to be okay. I could feel it.

Then she said the words I had longed to hear from my mother my entire life:
"And when my time comes, you’re going to be okay too.”

She went on to tell me how she raised me to be a strong woman. She said it with such confidence in herself about how she raised me that I had no other choice but to believe that I was a strong woman.

The next morning, my grandmother passed away.

I can’t imagine the grief my mother felt that day and in the days that followed, but I can tell you this:
She was ok. And I got to witness that.

Moms, I need you to hear this:

That conversation has never left me.

My mother and I continue to have ongoing challenges in our relationship, but that moment stands as the most powerful and regulating moment in my life. She gave it to me not through giving me certainty or protection from pain, but through this singular belief:

She’s going to be okay.
And by extension:
I will be too.

For the first time, I felt my nervous system settle around the idea that loss—even devastating loss—was survivable. It made me feel that most other things would be survivable too.

That moment did not remove grief or pain from my life.
It gave me capacity.

As an infant and early child mental health specialist, here’s what I wish more parents knew:

Your child does not need you to get everything right.
In fact, trying to do so often communicates the opposite of safety.
Perfection whispers:
“If I mess this up, you won’t be okay.”
Perfection seeks evidence for this.
Children feel that. They internalize it.

What children need instead is this:
A caregiver whose nervous system fundamentally believes:
My child is going to be okay, even when things are hard. My child is resilient. They are held by more than just me. They are not fragile, or broken, or behind, or failing.

That belief from a parent becomes an internal resource for a child.
When they doubt, they borrow our belief in them.

Here’s the catch:

In order for us to hold these belief systems about our children— not just as ideas, but as deep, embodied knowings in our nervous systems— we first have to believe them about ourselves. Which can be complicated if we, too, had mothers who had mothers who struggled to communicate safety.

So incase your mother can’t tell you this—
whether it’s because she isn’t here anymore, or she never was, or she didn’t know it for herself, or she always did and just didn’t have the language for it—
I need you to know:

You are going to be okay, even when things are hard. You are resilient. You are not fragile, you are not broken, you are not behind, you are not failing. You are held by something more than just you.

You are going to be okay.

For those of you who I’ve had the privilege of working with, I know this intimately. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve been inspired by it myself. Witnessing you helps me trust myself more.

What I want my mother to know:
I love her dearly- not because she got it all right, but because of the way she fervently loves puzzles, and never says no to a challenge, and gets scared on bridges, and loves telling anyone who will listen about that one time we got caught in a tornado in Kansas, and goes snowmobiling even with a dislocated shoulder. I love her for her humanness.

She didn’t get it all right. And I don’t say that to be harsh. I say that to let you know that I never needed her to get everything right. All I needed was for to trust herself as a mother and trust me as a daughter, for her to be okay, and to believe that I would be too.

*please note: I use this gendered language in this piece to speak to my experience and identity, but all of this can be read through the language of “parent” and “child” and if that resonates more with you, know that I see you.