Kitija Ozolina · Awareness Mentor for Mothers
The Grief Nobody Talks About: Mourning the Childhood You Deserved
Nobody names this one. But a lot of mothers are carrying it.
There is a kind of sadness that comes with motherhood that no one really prepares you for. Not grief over losing someone. Grief over something harder to name.
This is what it is.
You are allowed to grieve a childhood that was not bad enough to talk about. You do not need a dramatic story. You do not need to have been harmed in ways that have names. Quietly not getting what you needed is still a loss.
Noticing this does not mean you are blaming your parents. It means you are finally seeing clearly. That is not the same thing. Both can be true: they did their best, and something was still missing. You are allowed to grieve the missing part.
What this grief looks like
It does not look like crying over a grave. It looks like nostalgia with no specific memory attached to it. A longing without a name.
It looks like someone asking what you enjoy and going quiet. It looks like catching yourself in a photo and not quite recognising the person looking back. It looks like a kind of restlessness. moving through your days feeling like something is slightly wrong without being able to say what.
Sometimes it looks like being irritable, or numb, or disconnected. Not because something bad happened. Just because something that was yours has been absent for so long that the absence has started to press.
Why nobody names it
Because we are supposed to be grateful. We chose this. We love them.
And so the grief sits with no permission to exist. You feel it and then you feel guilty for feeling it. You wonder what is wrong with you. You are grateful. you genuinely are. and still something is missing, and that does not make sense to you.
It makes sense. It just does not fit the story we are given about what motherhood is supposed to feel like.
Gratitude and grief can live in the same body at the same time. That is not a contradiction. That is being human.
What the grief is actually asking for
Not to go back. You cannot go back, and I think most of us do not actually want to. not completely. The life before was missing what came after.
What the grief is asking for is something to come forward. Not the whole woman you were. she has changed too, and some of that change is good. But something. A piece of you that is still yours. An opinion you still have. Something you still care about that exists outside of your roles.
The grief is pointing at an absence. And the absence can be filled. not all at once, not dramatically, but a little. Something that is yours, kept alive.
I think that is what it is asking for. I am still figuring out what that looks like for me.
If you felt something reading this. the grief is real. It does not need to be explained or justified or earned. It is yours.
One next step, if you want one
Write a letter to the childhood you didn't have.
Not to your parents. Not to explain or blame. Just to the child who deserved something different. who deserved to be seen, to be held, to be told she was enough. Say the things that were not said. Grieve what was not there. You do not have to send it anywhere. It is just for her.
If writing feels like too much right now, start smaller. Just say it out loud once, even to yourself: the childhood I deserved would have felt like ___. You do not have to finish the sentence. Just begin it.
You are allowed to grieve what was never there. That loss was real.
Naming it does not undo it. But carrying grief that has a name is lighter than carrying grief that has none.
What loss in your life still doesn't have a name?
With love, Kitija 🤍
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I write when there is something new. Nothing else.