The Wound That Wore My Mother’s Face

---EllaeenahJadeFire

My relationship with my mother began with a wound.

Before I was even born, while I was still in her womb, something happened that my tiny body and soul experienced as rejection. I did not have words for it. I could not understand circumstances or intentions. I only carried the feeling.

My mother does not want me.

That feeling settled somewhere deep inside me.

And yet, as a little girl, I was completely attached to her.

I needed to be near her. I wanted to sit close to her, to feel her beside me, to know that she was there. Her presence mattered to me more than I could ever have explained. I longed for closeness with her because, beneath everything, I loved her deeply.

Perhaps I also stayed so close because some part of me was always afraid of losing her.

There was a painful contradiction inside me from the very beginning. I desperately wanted my mother, but I also carried the belief that she had rejected me.

I did not know that both feelings could exist together.

I only knew that I needed her.

As I grew older, especially when I entered my pre-teen and teenage years, the wounds I had carried silently began to rise to the surface.

The little girl who once wanted nothing more than to sit close to her mother began pushing her away.

I stopped letting her in.

When she tried to reach out to me, I rejected her. When she tried to come closer, I shut the door. I became angry, rebellious and emotionally closed.

I blamed her for everything.

Every hurt somehow became her fault. Every disappointment found its way back to her. All the pain I could not understand, and all the feelings I did not know how to hold, were placed at her feet.

I made her responsible for wounds neither of us understood.

At the time, my anger felt completely justified. I believed she had hurt me. I believed she had failed me. I believed she was the reason I felt the way I did.

But beneath all that anger was a daughter who still wanted her mother.

That was the part I could not admit.

I acted as though I did not need her, but I did.

I behaved as though I did not care, but I cared deeply.

I rejected her love while silently longing for it.

The closer she tried to come, the more fiercely I pushed her away. I think some part of me was saying, You rejected me first. Now I will reject you before you can hurt me again.

But I did not know that then.

All I knew was how to protect myself.

My anger protected me.

My rebellion protected me.

My emotional distance protected me.

Or at least, that was what I believed.

In reality, those walls did not only keep pain out. They kept love out too.

This continued through my teenage years and into my young adulthood. I carried my anger, and my mother carried the burden of my blame.

She did not know how to reach me.

I did not know how to let myself be reached.

And both of us were hurting.

…………The Beginning of Healing

I began my healing journey in my very early thirties.

As I started going deeper into myself, I began to understand that my reactions to my mother were not only about what was happening between us in the present. I was responding from a much younger place; a wounded place that still believed it had been rejected.

For the first time, I began to look at my mother not only as my mother, but as a woman with a life, a childhood and wounds of her own.

That changed everything.

My mother had lost her own mother when she was very, very young.

She had grown up without a mother to guide her, nurture her or show her how to mother a child. Even though my grandfather was a loving, kind man, he didn't how to be a mother. She had never experienced the kind of mothering I expected her to instinctively know how to give me.

For so long, I had asked only one question:

Why could she not be the mother I needed?

Healing helped me ask a different question:

Who had ever taught her how to be that mother?

The answer broke something open inside me.

No one had.

She had become a mother while still carrying the pain of being a motherless child.

She was trying to give me something she herself had barely known.

I began to see that what I had experienced as rejection had not come from a lack of love. It had come from a young woman’s wounds, limitations and lack of understanding.

She was not trying to hurt me.

She simply did not always know how to give what she had never received.

She had simply been a young mother confused by her own fears.

When I truly understood this, I felt years of blame begin to loosen inside me.

This did not mean that my feelings as a child were wrong. The pain I experienced was real. The rejection I felt was real in my body and in my emotional world.

But what I had believed about my mother was not the whole truth.

I had believed that I felt rejected because she did not love me enough.

Now I could see that she had loved me deeply, but through her own unhealed wounds.

That realisation did not erase my pain, but it changed my relationship with it.

It allowed me to stop making my mother the enemy in my story.

……Finally Seeing Her

For the first time, I truly saw her.

I saw the young girl who had lost her mother.

I saw the young woman who had entered motherhood without the support and emotional foundation she needed.

I saw how much guilt she had carried because of the anger and rejection I directed towards her.

I saw how deeply my shutting her out had hurt her.

And I saw that, just as I had once been a little girl longing for my mother, there had always been a little girl inside her longing for hers.

We were not simply a confused mother and an angry daughter.

We were two wounded daughters standing in front of each other.

That understanding brought me a kind of compassion I had never felt before.

I no longer wanted her to keep paying for what had happened.

I no longer wanted to keep punishing her for the pain I had carried.

I wanted both of us to be free.

As I released my blame, she began to release her guilt.

She had carried so much guilt about the kind of mother she had been. She had blamed herself for my anger, my rebellion and the distance between us.

My healing allowed me to tell her, in different ways and through many conversations, that I finally understood.

I understood that she had done what she could with what she knew.

I understood that she had loved me even when she did not know how to express that love in the way I needed.

I understood that she was not to blame for everything I had once placed upon her.

And slowly, we began to find each other again.

……The Mother I Had Shut Out Became My Closest Friend

My mother became my closest friend and one of my greatest allies.

Even now, that feels extraordinary to me.

The woman I had blamed for everything became the person I could share everything with.

The woman whose attempts to reach me I had repeatedly rejected became the woman whose presence I valued so deeply.

The mother I had once shut out became one of the safest and most important people in my life.

Our relationship did not change because we pretended the past had never happened. It changed because we finally understood it.

We spoke.

We listened.

We allowed each other to be human.

I stopped expecting her to go back and become the mother my younger self had wanted. Instead, I opened my heart to the mother who was standing in front of me - the strong woman who had grown, healed and found her own way back to herself. The woman I called ‘my warrior’.

She also did her healing.

In late middle age, and beyond, she faced and healed many of her own deep mother wounds. She began to understand how losing her mother so young had shaped her. She began to see the ways in which that early loss had affected her relationship with me.

As she healed, she became freer.

As I healed, I became softer.

We met each other in that new space.

I am so deeply grateful that we were given more than twenty-five years of true connection before she left this life.

Those years mean everything to me.

We did not remain trapped in the beginning of our story.

We found our way through the anger, the guilt, the rejection and the pain. We created something new together - something deeply fulfilling for both of us.

I had the joy of knowing my mother not only as my mother, but as my friend.

She became the person who stood beside me, supported me and understood me. I could turn to her. I could talk to her. I could allow myself to love her openly.

And she was finally able to have the daughter she had kept trying to reach.

Sometimes I think of the little girl I once was, always wanting to sit close to her mother.

For many years, I pushed that little girl away too. I buried her needs beneath anger and fierce independence. I acted as though that longing had disappeared.

But it had never disappeared.

Healing allowed me to return to that love without the fear and pain that had once surrounded it.

In a way, after all those years, I was able to sit close to my mother again.

Not only physically, but with my heart open.

….. Our Soul Contract

As our relationship deepened, my mother and I came to understand that there were soul lessons between us.

We began to see our relationship as part of a soul contract; an agreement that was not meant to punish either of us, but to bring certain very old wounds into the light so that they could be healed.

The wound between us was not only mine.

It had travelled through generations.

My mother carried the pain of losing her mother. I carried the pain of feeling rejected by mine. And my daughter carries the wounds that I was responsible for handing down to her. For years, those wounds collided with each other without any of us understanding what was happening.

But perhaps our souls had come together to interrupt that pattern.

Perhaps I was meant to bring her mother wound to the surface, painful as that was.

Perhaps she was meant to bring my rejection wound to the surface.

Perhaps I was meant to bring my daughter’s wound around self-love to the surface, so that it could be seen and healed.

Perhaps we had agreed, at a level beyond our human understanding, to help each other face what could no longer remain hidden.

Our soul contract was not fulfilled through the years of pain.

It was fulfilled when we chose to heal.

It was fulfilled when I stopped blaming my mother and began seeing her.

It was fulfilled when she released her guilt and forgave herself. And her mother.

It was fulfilled when we chose love over the roles we had unconsciously played for so many years.

She was no longer the mother who had, I believed, rejected me.

I was no longer the daughter who had rejected her in return.

We became two souls who had travelled through a painful human experience and had finally understood why.

….What I Know Now

I know now that a child can feel deeply rejected even when a mother loves her.

I know that a mother can love her child deeply and still be unable to give that child everything she needs.

I know that people sometimes hurt us through the places in themselves that have never been held or healed.

I know that understanding someone’s wounds does not make our pain unreal. But it can stop pain from becoming a life sentence for both people.

Most of all, I know that love can survive beneath years of deep anger.

It can wait beneath blame.

It can remain present beneath silence, distance and rejection.

The love between my mother and me was always there.

For many years, I could not feel it because my wound was louder.

When I began to heal, the wound became quieter, and I could finally hear the love beneath it.

I will always be grateful that I saw the truth while she was still here.

I am grateful that she knew I no longer blamed her.

I am grateful that she could release the guilt she had carried.

I am grateful that we had more than twenty-five years of closeness, friendship and love.

I am grateful that I had opportunity to serve her.

am grateful that our story did not end where it began.

We began as a mother and daughter separated by wounds neither of us understood.

We found our way back to each other as two women who could finally see, forgive and love one another fully.

And in finding each other, we both came home.

I love you Mum. And thank you. You know for what.

P.S. I didn’t realise, until I began healing my own mother wound, how deeply it can affect different areas of our lives.

It can influence imbalances in our feminine energy, conflict in mother-daughter relationships, and the uneasiness that sometimes arises in our friendships and interactions with other women.

It may also show up in our relationship with scarcity, creativity, financial and emotional independence, and the emotional experiences surrounding conception, pregnancy, and motherhood (as it did for me).

This is why I am bringing you:

Breaking the Cycle: Healing the Mother Wound - A Six-Hour Intensive

This intensive is open to both women and men, because the mother wound can affect all of us, and healing it can help us break patterns that may have continued for generations.

In person: Friday, 31 July 2026

Online: Saturday and Sunday, 1–2 August 2026

Recording available

CLICK HERE to read more about the intensive, and REGISTER here:https://www.jadefirelight.com/masterclasses/breakingthecycle