When Your Becomes Your Mother

There are some subjects we talk about endlessly.

Women’s wounds, trauma, and triggers, even.

Those conversations for sure matter.

But there is another conversation we rarely have, and I think our relationships are paying the price for our silence.

We don’t know what to do with wounded men.

Before I go any further, let me say something important. This pattern is not unique to men. Women carry father wounds. Women carry mother wounds. Women can become emotionally dependent on their husbands in deeply unhealthy ways. The roles absolutely reverse. What I’m writing about here is one relationship dynamic that I believe has become an ever-growing crisis. We rarely talk about it, yet I see its fingerprints all over the marriages sitting across from me.

We spend a great deal of time talking about toxic masculinity. I wonder if we’ve spent enough time talking about wounded masculinity, which FYI is toxic.

Sure there is a difference, but there is also a partnership in these.

One seeks power over others.

The other never fully learns how to stand on its own.

Looking back, I can finally see that my first marriage was primarily built on two sets of childhood wounds that neither of us understood.

I was eighteen years old.

He was twenty-eight.

I thought I was becoming someone’s wife.

What I couldn’t see was that I was slowly becoming someone’s mother.

I don’t write those words with anger anymore. I write them with compassion because it took me years after our divorce to understand what I had actually lived. I brought my father wounds into that marriage. He brought wounds of his own. We didn’t know how much our childhoods were sitting at the kitchen table with us every day.

Looking back now, I don’t think we had a marriage as much as we had two wounded children trying to raise each other.

That revelation still hurts deeply, because its so damn true and it caused undeserved or needed challenges in our relationship and with our family unit. For our children.

Childhood wounds don’t disappear because we exchange wedding vows. They slowly move into the marriage and begin shaping the relationship from behind the scenes. They influence how we handle conflict, how we ask for love, how we respond to disappointment, and what roles begin to feel strangely familiar.

One of those roles is the one nobody talks about. Seriously, its the redheaded step-child….lol to the healing world even.

Sometimes a boy grows up in a relationship where his mother depends on him emotionally in ways that should have been carried by another adult. Therapists sometimes call this emotional incest. Despite the unsettling name, it has nothing to do with sexual abuse. It describes an emotional role reversal where a child becomes the comforter, the emotional partner, the confidant, or the person responsible for meeting needs that never belonged on young shoulders.

Children adapt.

They always do.

The problem is that adaptation often follows them into adulthood.

When a boy learns that closeness means someone anticipating his needs, regulating his emotions, or carrying responsibility for him, that pattern can become his definition of love. He grows older. He may become successful. He may become a husband and a father. Yet part of him is still searching for the kind of relationship that feels familiar, even if it isn’t healthy.

This isn’t about blaming mothers by the way.

Many women never intended to create this dynamic. Some were carrying impossible burdens of their own. Others had never experienced healthy emotional boundaries themselves. Hurt people often pass along patterns they never meant to teach. I see my hurt patterns in my own children all too often and that pains me, but… its all about awareness, recognition and taking action in your healing. No matter where you are at.

This also isn’t about blaming men, either.

It’s about understanding them.

Because I ache for the men I meet.

I see men who genuinely want to be good husbands and fathers, yet somehow keep finding themselves dependent on the women they love. I see wives who begin their marriages as partners and slowly become managers, caretakers, and emotional mothers without ever realizing the shift has happened.

The tragedy is that neither person usually notices while it’s unfolding.

By the time someone finally says, “I feel more like your parent than your spouse,” the pattern has often been rehearsed for years.

And once a marriage begins feeling like a parent-child relationship instead of a partnership, both people lose something neither of them ever intended to give away.

The cost of this pattern isn’t carried by one person.

Both husband and wife pay for it.

The woman who slowly becomes the mother of the relationship often mistakes her exhaustion for love. She tells herself she’s simply being responsible. She believes she’s holding everything together. For a while, she is. But carrying another adult eventually comes at the expense of intimacy. It’s difficult to feel desire for someone you’ve unconsciously begun parenting. Respect quietly erodes. Attraction often follows. Before long, she wonders where the partnership went, never realizing she slowly stepped into a role she was never meant to fill.

The man loses something, too.

When another adult consistently carries what he could have learned to carry himself, he loses more than responsibility. He loses practice. Confidence isn’t built by watching someone else solve your problems. Leadership isn’t developed by having life anticipated for you. Emotional maturity grows through experience, discomfort, failure, repair, and learning to carry the weight that belongs to you.

No one becomes emotionally strong because someone else continually rescues them.

That’s one of the reasons this conversation matters so much to me.

We’re living through a time when many women are exhausted and many men feel lost. We often talk about these realities as though they’re unrelated, but I don’t believe they are. I think they’re two sides of the same relationship crisis.

When boys aren’t guided into healthy emotional adulthood, they don’t simply struggle internally. That struggle eventually touches their marriages, their children, their friendships, and their sense of purpose. At the same time, the women who love them slowly begin carrying more and more of what was never theirs to carry. The result is a relationship where neither person gets to become who they were capable of becoming.

That isn’t healthy masculinity.

It isn’t healthy femininity either.

It’s two people adapting to wounds instead of healing them.

Perhaps that’s why this series has stayed with me for so long.

Years after my divorce, I found myself noticing something that broke my heart. I could see moments where some of our children were beginning to slip into that same caretaking posture with their father. I won’t tell their stories because they aren’t mine to tell, but I remember thinking, The role didn’t disappear. It simply went looking for another person to carry it.

That’s when I realized these patterns don’t just affect marriages.

They move through generations. Unless someone notices them and decides the cycle ends here.

That decision doesn’t begin by blaming our parents. Most parents loved their children with the tools they had. Many mothers who became emotionally enmeshed with their sons were carrying unbearable loneliness, abandonment, betrayal, or fear themselves. Compassion belongs in this conversation.

So does responsibility though.

Healing doesn’t happen by identifying who handed us the wound.

Healing begins when we decide it won’t determine the rest of our lives.

Which brings me back to a question I’ve been asking myself more and more.

What if the man you’re frustrated with is still looking for a mother because no one ever showed him how to become a man?

Not a man who dominates.

Or a man who hides his emotions.

Not a man who performs strength while avoiding responsibility.

A man who knows how to carry his own life with humility, courage, emotional maturity, and love.

That question isn’t meant to excuse unhealthy behavior. It’s meant to help us understand it.

Understanding creates compassion.

Compassion creates better conversations.

Better conversations create the possibility of change.

Because the goal was never to assign blame here.

The goal has always been to help two wounded people stop raising each other… and finally begin loving each other as partners.

*This is Part Three of The Loop series.

→As you read this, who came to mind?

Maybe you recognized yourself. Maybe you saw your spouse. Maybe you found yourself thinking about your parents, or even patterns you’ve begun noticing in your own children.

The goal of this conversation isn’t to assign blame. It’s to bring hidden relationship dynamics into the light, because what we can finally see, we can begin to change.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Did this musing give language to something you’ve experienced? Have you ever found yourself becoming the parent instead of the partner? Or did it help you better understand someone you love?

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it. Someone else may have been living this pattern for years without ever having words for it.

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

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This post was previously published on medium.com.