When my children were small and they would bring me a drawing – the kind with lopsided suns and houses with too many windows and figures that were more feeling than form – I never told them it was amazing.
I asked them how they felt about it.
Not because I didn’t think it was wonderful. I did. But because I had learned something important from my own mother – something it took me years to fully understand and a lifetime to appreciate: that a child who creates for her own satisfaction grows into a person who lives for her own satisfaction. That the most dangerous thing you can do to someone you love is make them need your approval to feel whole.
My mother taught me that. Not in a lecture. Not with a lesson plan. She taught me by loving me in a way that never once asked me to perform for it.
She is gone now. And there are days – more than I expected, arriving without warning in the middle of ordinary moments – when the absence of that love feels less like grief and more like losing the ground beneath my feet.
She loved me without conditions. Her love never required a performance. I did not understand, until she was gone, how rare that is – or how much of my identity had been built inside the safety of it.
The Person Who Knew You First
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing the person who knew you longest and most completely. Not just your history – though that loss is real and significant – but your witness. The person whose knowledge of you predates your own self-knowledge. Who saw you before you had language for yourself. Who held a version of you that existed before the world got its hands on you and started offering opinions.
For many of us, that person is a mother.
When she is gone, something shifts in the way you exist in the world. Not immediately – grief rarely announces its full scope at the door. But over time, in quiet moments, you begin to notice: there is no one left who remembers you that way. No one who holds the earliest chapters. No one whose love for you is so old and so unconditional that it requires nothing from you in return – not success, not composure, not a particular version of yourself on a particular kind of day.
You become, in a sense, the sole keeper of your own origin story. And that is a lonelier place than anyone tells you it will be.
What Unconditional Love Actually Does
We use the phrase unconditional love easily. We put it on greeting cards and in wedding vows and in parenting books. But I want to talk about what it actually does – functionally, psychologically – when someone loves you that way. Because it is not simply a feeling. It is a foundation.
When you are loved without conditions – when you do not have to earn it, maintain it, perform for it, or worry about losing it – something becomes possible that is very difficult to build any other way: a stable sense of self. A self that does not shift depending on who is in the room. A self that does not collapse when it is criticized, questioned, or publicly challenged. A self that knows, at its core, that its worth is not up for a vote.
My mother gave me that. Not perfectly – no one does anything perfectly – but genuinely and consistently enough that it became the ground I stood on. When the world told me I was slow, I had her voice underneath it. When I was labeled and dismissed and underestimated, I had somewhere to return to – a relationship in which I was known and loved as I actually was, not as others needed me to be.
Psychologists and Social Workers call this a secure attachment – the experience of having a reliable, safe relationship that allows you to go out into the world with confidence because you know there is somewhere steady to come back to. Research consistently shows that secure attachment in childhood is one of the strongest predictors of resilience in adulthood. Of the ability to take risks. To recover from failure. To maintain a sense of self under pressure.
My mother was my secure attachment. And I did not fully understand what that meant until I no longer had it.
When the person who loved you without conditions is gone, you don’t just lose them. You lose the place where you were most fully known. And you have to learn, slowly and imperfectly, to be that place for yourself.
What She Allowed Me to Become
My mother was intentional in ways I am still discovering.
She did not steer me toward her dreams. She did not need me to fulfill something in her that had gone unfulfilled. She did not hold on when holding on would have been easier – for her, if not for me. She allowed me to spread my wings without trying to redirect my flight.
That sounds simple. It is not. It requires a particular kind of love that is more interested in the other person’s becoming than in its own comfort. A love that can watch someone leave and call it success. A love that measures itself not by proximity but by the health and freedom of the person it’s loving.
She taught me, by living it, that being proud of yourself matters more than pleasing others. That your own assessment of your life – your own sense of whether you are living with integrity and intention – is the only verdict that has lasting weight.
I have tried to pass that forward. When my sons DJ and Sam were growing up and brought me something they had made or a decision they were wrestling with, I tried to ask questions rather than hand them conclusions. When they chose paths I would not have drawn for them – DJ building his own business in Texas, Sam enlisting in the United States Air Force and serving today as a Weather Journeyman – I tried to trust the maps they were drawing themselves rather than redirect them toward mine
My mother taught me that. I am only now beginning to understand how deliberate it was – and how much courage it takes to love someone enough to let them become who they are rather than who you imagined they would be.
The Grief Underneath the Grief
Here is what I did not expect about losing her.
I expected the missing. I expected the moments at holidays and milestones where her absence would be its own kind of presence. I expected the grief to arrive in waves – and it does, reliably and without much warning, in the middle of ordinary Tuesdays.
What I did not expect was how her absence would intersect with every other hard season. How grief compounds. How when something difficult arrives – when your life is challenged or your identity is questioned or you find yourself in a season you did not plan for – the absence of the person who would have known exactly what to say becomes its own kind of wound inside the larger one.
She would have known. That is the thing I return to most often. Whatever I was navigating, she would have known who I was inside it. She would not have needed me to explain or justify or perform competence. She would have simply known – because she had always known – and that knowing would have been enough to help me know myself.
Grief, I have come to understand, is not only about the person who is gone. It is about the version of yourself that existed in relationship to them. When we lose someone who knew us deeply, we also lose a particular way of being known – and we have to do the slow, disorienting work of finding out who we are without that mirror.
Grief is not only about the person who is gone. It is about the version of yourself that existed in relationship to them – and the slow work of finding out who you are without that mirror.
What I Am Learning to Carry Forward
My daughter is leaving for college in a few months. I have been thinking about my mother constantly.
Not only because I miss her – though I do, in the particular sharpened way that milestones bring – but because I am trying to do what she did. To love Kara in a way that does not need her to stay. To be proud of the leaving. To trust that the roots I have tried to give her are strong enough to hold her as she grows outward into her own life.
My mother let me go. And what I understand now – standing on this side of it, with my own daughter ready and full of her own particular future – is that letting go is not the absence of love. It is love’s highest expression. It is saying: I love you enough to want your life more than I want my comfort.
That is what she gave me. That is what I am trying, imperfectly and with a great deal of midnight crying, to give Kara.
And somewhere in that intention – in the deliberate, conscious choice to love without holding – I find my mother again. Not gone. Changed. Living in the way I parent, the way I love, the way I try to let the people I care about most take up all the space they need without asking them to leave room for my approval.
Her love did not require a performance.
I am learning, finally, to believe that mine does not either.
Who is the person who knew you most completely?
And who are you learning to be in their absence?
Sheri Boelter is a clinical social worker, former behavioral health nonprofit executive, and author of the forthcoming memoir Not What They Said I Was. She writes about identity, resilience, grief, and the beautiful, brutal work of becoming. Read more and subscribe at sheriboelter.substack.com.