Are You My Mother? The Devestation Caused of Loss
Dedicated to Abby Kelman Portney
By Michael Kelman Portney
There’s a children’s book called Are You My Mother? where a baby bird hatches alone and goes on a journey asking every creature he sees whether they’re his mother. A dog. A cow. A bulldozer. He’s searching for something specific—someone who recognizes him. Someone who wants him. Someone who’s safe.
I used to think that was just a cute story.
Now I know it’s a metaphor for surviving emotional neglect.
This blog isn’t for people with warm moms. It’s not for people who can “talk things out” at brunch or post filtered selfies together on Mother’s Day. This is for the people who wake up every day feeling like they were born into the wrong family, like someone handed them a script full of betrayal and called it “love.”
You Weren’t Crazy. She Just Couldn’t See You.
Some mothers can’t love their children. Not because the children are unlovable—but because those mothers are emotionally stunted, insecure, narcissistic, or terrified of their own inadequacy.
So instead of meeting your needs, they minimized them.
Instead of apologizing, they attacked.
Instead of accountability, they gave you gaslighting:
“You’re too sensitive.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“Are you on drugs?”
“Why are you trying to destroy this family?”
No matter how calm you stayed. No matter how many times you tried to explain what hurt. No matter how rational, articulate, vulnerable you were—she took your truth as a threat.
Because it was a threat—to the fragile lie she told herself every day:
That she was a good mother.
When the Truth Becomes the Enemy
Try telling your mom she hurt you. See how fast she turns it around:
You’re ungrateful.
You’re mentally ill.
You’re dramatic.
You’re attacking her.
What you’ll notice is that the actual content of what you’re saying never gets addressed. You could be breaking down timelines, presenting receipts, begging for dialogue—none of it matters. Because the moment your truth pokes a hole in her myth, she hits the kill switch.
She accuses. She blocks. She cuts you off.
Why? Because if she actually heard you—if she really understood what she did—she’d have to change. And change terrifies people who built their identities on denial.
The Mother-Shaped Hole
There’s a specific kind of grief that comes from watching your mother choose her ego over your healing. It’s a private hell that nobody talks about because “mothers are sacred.”
No. Not all of them.
Some mothers teach love.
Some teach survival.
Some just teach you how to dodge emotional landmines before breakfast.
The world doesn’t want to believe mothers can be cruel, selfish, or destructive. It doesn’t want to hear about kids who went no contact not because they were rebellious, but because they were tired of being baited, invalidated, and emotionally eviscerated every time they opened their mouths.
Weaponized Shame
There’s a recurring pattern with these kinds of mothers:
They deny your pain.
They attack your character.
They paint themselves as the victim.
And if you bring up therapy? That’s “manipulative.”
Set a boundary? That’s “abusive.”
Express your emotions? Now you’re “on drugs.”
But they’ll never look in the mirror and say the thing they fear most:
“I was wrong. I failed you. I didn’t know how to love you.”
Because for them, parenting was never about you. It was about them. Their image. Their control. Their narrative.
Family Doesn’t Mean Safety
You didn’t choose her. But you do get to choose who gets access to you now.
Let’s be clear: you don’t owe anyone your silence just because they share your DNA. If your mother can't sit through 45 minutes of family therapy without spinning into accusations and character assassination, that’s not your failure—that’s hers.
And if you tell her the truth about your pain and her first instinct is to blame the drugs you’re not on, rather than ask herself what role she played?
You are not the problem.
You Are the First Link in a New Chain
If you’re the one trying to break the cycle—confront the dysfunction, untangle the lies, set the boundaries—you will be seen as the enemy. Not because you’re wrong. But because your clarity burns through the fog that keeps the system in place.
They’ll say you’re “too much.”
That you’re “hurting the family.”
That you need to just “move on.”
But moving on doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen.
It means reclaiming your story.
Reparent Yourself. Grieve Her. And Let Her Go.
Some people aren’t meant to be in your life, even if they gave you life.
You can mourn the mother you needed and didn’t get.
You can rage against the gaslighting.
You can walk away and build something new.
You don’t have to keep knocking on a locked door just because it was once called “home.”
And if you’re still wondering, still searching, still aching like that baby bird:
Are you my mother?
The answer might be:
No.
But that doesn’t mean you’re motherless.
It means you’re free to stop looking in the wrong place.
You were always worthy of love.
You were just born to someone who couldn’t give it.
And now, you get to decide who gets to know the real you.
Let that be your legacy—not hers.
