Does She Hate Me?

The kind that quietly teaches you that your feelings can wait, that your needs are secondary, that being resilient is more valuable than being understood.

I am not saying this happens all the time. And when that lesson repeats itself long enough, your emotions stop demanding space. They soften, they retreat, until they become background noise even to yourself.

A soft, invisible kind of neglect.
Not the dramatic kind that makes good stories.
But the slow kind.
The kind that teaches you, gently but firmly, that your feelings can wait.
That your needs are negotiable.
That being “strong” is more useful than being heard.

My mother and I are like earth and sky.
Always touching at the horizon,
never fully meeting.
But we are also mirrors.

We look alike not only in our faces, but in our temperaments, in the way we speak when we are overwhelmed, in how our silence sharpens when we are hurt. We carry the same fire, the same emotional weight. Maybe that is why we argue more than my siblings ever do with her. It is easier to collide with someone who reflects the parts of you you have never been taught how to understand.

How silence becomes our weapon and our shield.

And maybe that’s why we clash more than she clashes with my siblings.
Because it’s easier to argue with someone who reflects the parts of you
you never had the luxury to understand.

For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me.

Why couldn’t I understand my mother?

Why did loving her feel like walking barefoot on broken glass?

Why did I hate myself so much for failing to be softer, quieter, easier?

And the question that haunted me the most —
why does my mom hate me?

That question lived quietly in my chest, shaping the way I saw myself, convincing me that I was fundamentally too much or never enough.

It took years to realize this truth, one that doesn’t excuse pain but explains its shape….

Sometimes, mothers struggle most with the child who resembles them too closely.

Especially in Asian parenting, where love is often expressed through control, discipline, and sacrifice, and tenderness is treated like a luxury. Many of our mothers were not raised to name their feelings, let alone protect them. They were taught to endure, to suppress, to survive. Softness was not something they were allowed to keep.

So when a mother sees her own sensitivity, her own stubbornness, her own unhealed wounds reflected in her child, it can feel unbearable.

What looks like anger can actually be fear….. the fear of facing parts of herself she had to abandon in order to live.

Sometimes, what looks like hatred is actually fear.
Fear of seeing their own wounds walking around in a younger body.
Fear of repeating a life they never got to choose.
Fear of softness because no one ever taught them it was safe.

The reflection child becomes a reminder of everything unresolved, everything she was never allowed to need, everything she learned to silence.

Like facing a version of themselves they were never allowed to protect.

Our mothers were not raised to be gentle with themselves.
They were taught to endure.
To swallow disappointment.
To keep moving even when something inside them ached quietly.

Understanding this did not suddenly heal my relationship with my mother. We are still earth and sky, still learning how to exist without colliding. But it changed the question inside me.

I stopped asking, “What is wrong with me?” and started asking, “What happened to her?”. Sometimes, they are simply struggling to face themselves in the mirror we never meant to become.

And so the conflict begins, not because the child is unlovable, but because the resemblance is too close, too honest, too painful.

And maybe that is where healing begins not in perfect forgiveness, but in realizing that sometimes, our mothers do not hate us.

Maybe healing doesn’t begin with understanding everything, but with holding space, for ourselves, and for the mothers who were never taught how to be gentle. And you’re not alone.

— B

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This post was previously published on medium.com.