Why I Couldn’t Stop Hearing My Mom in My Own Voice (and What That Has to Do with Parenting)
The first time I heard it was a Tuesday, which felt insulting in its ordinariness. My seven-year-old was on the floor pulling on his socks slowly—at a pace that could only be described as geological. We were already late. I could feel the heat rising in my chest, and out of my mouth came a sentence I had not planned on saying.
“Just let me do it. Honestly, it takes you twenty minutes to put on two socks.”
His face snapped up. I saw the flicker of hurt and something else—the instinct to retreat, to go quiet, to erase himself from the room.
I froze, because I knew that look. It was the look I had as a kid, sitting on the same hallway rug while my mom stood over me, sighing, already reaching down to do the thing I was doing myself.
That was the moment I realized I was carrying something I hadn’t actually unpacked. The resentment I have toward my mom wasn’t just hiding in the old conversations I had with my sister about her. It was showing up in my hands, in my tone, in the way I was raising my own child.
I need help letting go of that resentment. And I’ve been slowly learning what that actually takes.
For a long time, I thought I had dealt with it. I’d talked it out with a counselor. I’d recognized her limitations. I know the reasons my mom was the way she was—a young immigrant mother working nights, exhausted, carrying her own childhood wounds. Knowing all of this intellectually, though, did absolutely nothing to stop the feeling that rose up in me whenever she questioned my parenting decisions. She’d say one thing about how I dress my kids in cold weather, and I’d feel the blood rush to my face. I’d be back in my body at age fifteen, being told that I was being dramatic, that nobody cared about my feelings, that I should just get over it.
So here’s the part I didn’t understand for years, and I want to tell you directly in case you’re in the same place: letting go of resentment toward your mom isn’t about forgiving her. It’s about not letting her take up so much space in the room you’re parenting in.
The change for me started with noticing the pattern physically. I had to name what was happening before I could change it. So I spent a week doing something very simple: I kept a note on my phone, and every time I felt that surge of irritation with my kids that was out of proportion to what they were doing, I wrote down what my mom’s voice would have said in a similar situation.
The results were uncomfortable. My mom’s voice lives in my head in ways I didn’t fully realize. When my kids leave their boots in the middle of the hallway: “Do you think I’m your servant?” When they forget their homework: “You never take responsibility.” When they cry over small things: “It’s not that bad—stop crying.”
I wasn’t actually realizing, while parenting, that I was routinely speaking to them with those scripts. I thought I was “correcting” them. Turns out I was just auditioning my mom’s worst lines, thirty years later.
The game-changing realization was that my resentment toward her wasn’t only painful—it was becoming a template for how I treated my own kids.
So I built a small practice that helps me break the pattern. I choose one thing to change at a time, not everything. Here’s what that actually looks like for me.
First, when I feel that surge of irritation with my kid during a transition—like morning school prep—I touch my thumb to my middle finger on my left hand. It’s subtle. Nobody sees it. It’s my secret signal to myself that says, “You are not your mom right now.” It takes about two seconds. It doesn’t make me calmer, exactly, but it makes me present enough to choose a different sentence.
Second, I use a replacement phrase that I’ve rehearsed in advance. Right now, when my son takes a long time getting dressed, I practice saying, “I see that you’re having a hard time getting ready. We’re out the door in five minutes.” It feels clumsy at first. Very awkward. But it’s a direct alternative to the old script, and I can rest it on my tongue like a pebble.
Third, I started writing down a list of what I want to give my children that my mom did not give to me. It’s not a bitter list. It’s small, concrete actions. For example: “I let my children be slow in the morning when we have time.” “I listen to the full sentence they are saying before I reply.” “I let them say ‘no’ to a hug at the door.” That list is a counter-template. Every time I add to it, I feel like I’m building something new. It slowly de-centers the resentment, because I’m not trying to simply not be her—I’m trying to be a person of my own.
I need to be honest: I still feel resentment toward my mom. There are days when I pick up the phone and see her name appear and I feel a small jolt of annoyance. The feeling hasn’t fully passed. But what has shifted is the size of it. The intensity doesn’t completely determine how I raise my kids anymore.
One of the things that helped me most was this. I realized I was resentful because I expected her to apologize and to have a real conversation about what happened. But that was never going to happen in the way I imagined, because she doesn’t see her own impact. She genuinely doesn’t. She thinks she did a great job—and in some ways, she did. She gave me a home, food, and safety. She just doesn’t understand that the daily little comments mattered.
I had to accept that she may never “get it.” Not because she’s in denial—just because we each see the past differently. I was the child who registered everything, and she was the parent who was just trying to survive the day. Both things are true.
The cutting of that cord has been less about a big dramatic confrontation and much more about daily life. Every time I don’t say the scripted line, every time I let my child make a small, significant mistake, every time I allow them to be imperfect, I’m getting rid of a tiny piece of the resentment. I’m not storing it up for the next time I talk to her. I’m letting it run its course in the actual act of raising a child.
The letting go is not done. It’s probably never fully done. Parenting your own kids tends to stir up old material constantly. But I have started to clear away the imaginary battlefield between me and my mom.
Tonight, my son was lying on the couch watching the snow fall. He asked if I wanted to sit with him. I said yes. For a moment, I noticed that in my mom’s version of the story, the couch and the snow would have been a mess to clean up. In my version, it was just a quiet moment between me and my son.
I’m not healed. I’m not over the resentment. But I’m starting to live next to it, rather than inside of it. And that has made me a better parent than I was last year. It is, I think, a good day’s work.
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