Letting go of resentment toward my mom: what it taught me about parenting
I was standing at the kitchen counter slicing carrots for salad when my daughter asked, “Why don’t we visit Grandma more often?”
My hand stopped. The knife hovered over a carrot. I felt a familiar tightening in my chest, the one I’d been ignoring for years. “Because she lives far away,” I said. That wasn’t true. She lived twenty minutes down the road.
My daughter looked at me for a second too long. Then she shrugged and went back to her drawing. I stood there, gripping the knife, and realized I’d just done the thing I swore I’d never do. I’d shut down a question about my mom without actually answering it. Just like my mom used to shut down mine.
That moment stayed with me. Not because I’d lied, but because I’d felt something sharper than inconvenience. I’d felt resentment. And it was still there, sitting underneath my skin, ready to surface at the smallest mention of her name.
I spent most of my twenties telling myself I was over it. Over the way my mom compared me to my cousins. Over the way she critiqued my weight, my grades, my friends. Over the way she showed up to my school plays but spent the whole ride home pointing out what I could have done better. I thought adulthood meant leaving that behind. But then I had my own daughter, and I started hearing my mom’s voice come out of my mouth.
It happened first when my daughter spilled juice on the floor. I heard myself say, “Honestly, you’re so careless.” She was four. She looked up at me with startled eyes, and I saw in her face exactly how I used to look at my mom. That was a wake-up call.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I just knew I didn’t want to become the person who makes her child feel small. So I started paying attention. And what I noticed was that my resentment wasn’t just about the big things. It was about the small, repeated moments. The way she never asked how I was feeling, only what I had accomplished. The way she smiled politely when I told her about my day, then changed the subject. The way I learned to stop talking because talking didn’t matter.
That’s the thing about resentment. It doesn’t live in the past. It lives in your body, and it tells you how to react in the present. Every time my daughter needed comfort, I felt a flicker of something cold. Not because I didn’t love her, but because I’d learned that closeness meant expecting criticism. So I kept a little distance. I thought it was protection. It was actually just the same wall my mom had built, passed down without a word.
A friend of mine, who had done some work on her own family stuff, gave me a suggestion. She said, “Write your mom a letter. Don’t send it. Just write it.”
I thought that was the most cliché thing I’d ever heard. But I was desperate enough to try. I sat down one evening with a notebook and started with the easy stuff: “Dear Mom, you never saw me.” Then I wrote about the time I came home from school with a drawing I was proud of. I was maybe seven. I held it up, and she said, “That’s nice, but why didn’t you color inside the lines?” I wrote about the time I got a lead role in a play, and she told me my voice was too quiet to hear. I wrote about the time I told her I felt sad, and she said, “Stop being dramatic.”
I filled three pages. It wasn’t angry. It was just specific. And once it was on paper, I realized something. My resentment wasn’t because my mom was a bad person. It was because I still wanted something from her that she couldn’t give. I wanted her to see me as I was, not as she wanted me to be. And I’d been holding my breath for that my whole life.
That letter changed how I parented, but not in a dramatic, overnight way. It changed the self-talk. When my daughter struggles with her homework and I feel that familiar frustration rising, I now have a phrase I use inside my head: “That’s her voice, not mine.” I say it when I’m about to criticize. I say it when I’m about to dismiss her feelings. It gives me a beat. Just one beat. But in that beat, I can choose a different reaction.
I’ve also started doing the opposite of what my mom did. Instead of focusing on what she did wrong, I ask my daughter how she feels. Not as a script, but genuinely. “What was the best part of your day?” “Did anything make you feel sad?” At first it felt awkward, like I was acting in a commercial about good parenting. But after a while, it started feeling real. My daughter talks more than she used to. She tells me things she doesn’t tell her dad. And I think it’s because she’s not bracing for me to correct her.
That doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven my mom completely. There are days I still feel angry. There are days I look at my daughter and think about all the things my mom missed, and I feel a wave of grief. I still don’t go to her house very often. I still keep conversations short. But the resentment is quieter now. It doesn’t run my hands when I’m slicing carrots. It doesn’t speak through my mouth before I can stop it.
I’ve learned that letting go doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen. It means taking the power out of it. It means saying, “That was then, and I am now.” It means recognizing that I can’t change my mom, but I can change what I let echo in my head.
A few weeks ago, my daughter showed me a picture she drew of our family. We were all stick figures under a big yellow sun. She said, “That’s you, that’s dad, that’s me, and that’s grandma.” She put Grandma right next to me. I looked at it and felt a small, surprising twist in my chest. But I didn’t snap. I just said, “That’s a really nice drawing.” And I meant it.
I’m not sure if the resentment will ever fully disappear. It’s been part of me for so long that letting it go feels like losing something familiar. But I know that my daughter doesn’t need to see me perfect. She needs to see me trying. She needs to know that the walls we build in childhood can be taken down, brick by brick, even if it takes years.
I still haven’t sent that letter. I don’t think I will. But I’ve stopped carrying it with me the same way. That’s the only part that matters.
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