The Daughter I Could Have Been

I am everything I wanted to be. That doesn't erase what I never got to be.

I want to start there because I know how a title like that sounds. It sounds like a woman about to apologize. Like, I'm going to tell you I was a disappointing daughter, and I've been carrying it ever since.

That isn't it. I wasn't a bad daughter. I had everything in me it takes to be a good one. I just never got handed the chance to spend it.

My parents divorced when I was five. Neither of them ever found steady ground after that, and the closeness I wanted from them never quite arrived. Not with a slam. Not with one terrible day I could point to and explain. It just kept not happening, year after year, and then I was grown.

So what I carry isn't guilt. It's grief, and it took me a long time to understand what the grief represents.  I’m not grieving the woman I became. I like who I turned out to be. 

I think about what that would have looked like in the smallest ways. Calling for no reason on the drive home from the store. Having a person to tell first when something good happened, before it went to anyone else. Being asked how I was by someone who would wait for the real answer instead of the polite one. Showing up somewhere and being fussed over. Getting advice I didn't ask for and being a little annoyed by it, the way you can only be annoyed by a mother who is paying close attention.

I could have been the daughter who called and shared and celebrated and leaned all the way in. I had that in me. I have always had that in me.

And here is the part I want to say plainly, because if you are carrying something like this, I think you need to hear it out loud. This is not a story about not being enough. It was never about my worth, and it was never about a shortage of love on my end. There was plenty of love. There was just nowhere to put it. What was missing was the opportunity, not me.

For a long time I thought I was supposed to get over it. That somewhere down the road there was a version of me who had made peace with it so completely that it stopped aching altogether. I've stopped waiting for her to show up. This is a room in me that stays a little dark, and I've made peace with the dark being there, which turns out to be a very different thing than the dark going away. I can sit in that room now without it running the whole house.

Here's what I didn't expect. All that love with nowhere to go didn't spoil. It waited.

I have two daughters. And I have never once had to wonder what kind of mother I wanted to be to them, because I spent my entire childhood quietly drawing up the plans. Every single thing I wished someone had done for me became a thing I knew to do for them. I wanted to be asked how I was and actually heard, so I asked, and then I stayed quiet long enough for the true answer to make it out. I wanted somewhere steady to land, so I built steady, on purpose, and I keep building it. I wanted the phone call for nothing. So I take theirs, every time, about nothing.

I'm not going to pretend that's a clean trade, or that it fixed the original thing. It isn't, and it didn't. My daughters don't exist to repair my childhood, and I work hard to never hand them that job. But the yearning wasn't wasted. It turned into an instruction. It taught me exactly where to stand.

If you're carrying your own version of this, the parent who couldn't, the closeness that never came, the phone that doesn't ring the way you once hoped it would, here's what finally let me set some of it down.

You can grieve a relationship you never got to have without it meaning anything was ever wrong with you. Both things can be true at once. You can be a whole, good, fully arrived person and still ache for a chance you were never actually offered. That ache isn't evidence of a flaw in you. It's evidence that you had love to give and went looking for somewhere to put it.

I became exactly who I was meant to be. I just never got to be the daughter I could have been.

I've stopped needing those two sentences to cancel each other out. They both live here now, in the same warm house, and there is room for both.