Today I wanted to talk about something I’d been putting off writing a blog post about. I felt so much pressure from myself to make sure it came across the correct way and I didn’t leave anything out. It’s very personal to me and a very vulnerable story to tell. But it’s important so I’m just going to go for it!
When I was four years old, my mum died.
My mum’s death wasn’t something my family were prepared for, nor did they see coming. Being four years old, not much goes through your head about the reality of this day. In fact, nearly eighteen years later, it’s hard to even remember the day at all. I don’t remember being told about it, I don’t remember feeling sad about it at the time, and I don’t remember the heart-drop feeling of losing someone close to you. I don’t think that was a feeling I was really capable of at that age. I couldn’t understand that I’d never see my own mum again.
I have two older brothers who were ages six and nine when our mum died. Our ages have led us to all have different experiences of the life we had with our mum. Personally, I don’t remember much about her. I have maybe one or two warped memories which I can’t be sure actually happened or whether they were just dreams. I don’t remember her voice or her personality. I wonder if I’d never seen a photo, if I’d actually know what she looked like. Saying this, she was my mum at the end of the day and being four, I would have been attached to her. When your mum dies at that age, you aren’t aware of how it will shape your future life. You don’t ensure you grasp on to parts of her to keep, like her touch or her actions to take into your adulthood, you just carry on with the life you had not understanding the long-term effects.
So, I grew up with my father and brothers and life was moving on. Being raised in a household of three boys and no mother at times felt isolating. I didn’t have the advice and guidance from a mother that I needed. I was also in a state of confusion. I think I was just confused why everybody else had a mum and I didn’t. I felt like the odd one out – all my friends’ mums seemed to be friends with each other which brought their daughters closer, but I never had that.
Growing up without a mother in my teenage years definitely made me more sensitive to friendships. I felt like I had more riding on everything since my friends were essentially filling the void of my mum. It was clear that my mental health was badly affected by this point and I felt so lonely. I had little to no confidence and I became a people pleaser. I just wanted approval from everyone. I couldn’t cope with being disliked or judged. Everything and anything I went through, no matter if it was solved, nothing was ever okay because at the end of the day, I still didn’t have a mum. It all seemed to trace back to that. I wanted that bond, to relate to and to tell everything to without the filter daughters have speaking to their fathers.
A lot of people think loss is just grief, but when it’s someone’s primary caregiver at a time where they need them in order to grow, it shapes their whole personality into adulthood. The majority of the people in my life now didn’t know me when my mum died. As much as they are aware of it, I don’t walk round with a big banner on my head saying ‘my mum died’ so it can easily be mis-considered and forgotten. I understand why, especially being twenty-two – your parents aren’t usually as involved in your friendships / personal life by this age. Anytime new people enter my life unaware of the fact my mum passed away, it inevitably comes up. And at that point, it feels so alien to me that in their mind, they’d have pictured me with a mum. Almost like I was actually normal for a few minutes. But that awkwardness of having to correct people is so uncomfortable (a lot of the time when I was younger, I remember just rolling with it and pretending I did have a mum). I wish I could go back and tell little me that it’s really not embarrassing that my mum died while I was so young. A lot of my personality has been shaped by the lack of mum I was raised with. It makes more sense to me now – the voids I felt, the personality I had. No matter how much people do for you or how many people are there for you, your mum is dead and no one can bring her back to you.
People talk about spirituality and feeling someone’s ongoing presence in your life despite their death but it’s hard to find a spiritual connection when you have no substance to form it from. I can’t feel my mum’s presence because I don’t remember the life I lived with her or any connection I even had – something I’ve always struggled with.
I lost my grandpa at the end of 2023, and to me, that felt like my first experience of someone close to me passing away. It seemed to upset me in a way that my mum’s death just didn’t. It feels like I haven’t really experienced her actual death – it’s more experiencing the growing up without a mum. So with my grandpa, it was like trying to navigate grieving someone for the first time. I don’t feel like I’m grieving my mum. The feeling is more confusion and disappointment – that I never got the life I should have had with her and that I’ve lost out of who I could have been or what I could have had. A lot of the pain I feel from her death was imagining how my dad felt – having lost his wife, having to raise three young children on his own, and then having to deal with knowing they were going to grow up without their mum. That would feel shit.
Fast forward to now. I am twenty-two. As you get older and your own life is moving on, you start to think about new aspects of losing your mum like getting married and her not being there, or having kids and them not having her. And knowing that I’ll never have my mum to confide in and help me when I have a baby of my own. So, it’s a weird one. I don’t really know what I’m made of. I look at my father and understand my similarities to him but then there’s this lost 50% of me that I just have never known.
The past three years are the years where I have learnt the most about myself and the psychology behind losing a parent at a young age. I never understood growing up why it had to be us. How we got unlucky in this way. But the difference now is that I understand why I am the way I am and why I feel the things I feel. I forgive myself more for the mistakes I’ve made and the regrets I have. I look back at my sixteen year old self and wish I could be the reassurance she needed. I wish I could tell her so many things. Like, you’re not evil or a bad person, you’re not strange or abnormal, you’re not incapable of success – your mum died. And that’s been with you your whole entire life. Forgive yourself for getting things wrong along the way.
I’ve learned that I don’t have to be a product of how I was raised – and that it’s okay to not be okay.
I urge people to understand that not everybody’s trauma is obvious, dealt with, or even remotely recent. Please be considerate of this – it could make a huge difference.
Mindfulistic 
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