Michelle Wollaston On Why So Many Women Carry the Mother Wound, and How It Ends With Us

Inspired by Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, this reflection explores how the silent expectations between mothers and daughters become the stories we are here to end.

We hear it everywhere now, the mother wound. It has become one of those phrases that drifts through therapy rooms and podcasts, a kind of shorthand for something many women feel but cannot quite name. But what does it actually mean?

At its core, the mother wound is the ache that forms when a daughter’s inner world is not fully seen, understood, or mirrored back to her. It does not always come from cruelty or neglect. Often, it grows in homes where love was present, but emotional connection was missing.

When we begin to see this clearly, we understand why so many of us are drawn to stories like It Ends With Us, because they speak to that moment of truth when a cycle finally breaks. The mother wound is not just about what we have inherited; it is about the quiet courage it takes to say, it ends with me.

How it begins

Most mothers did not consciously wound their daughters; they were surviving their own cultural and generational realities. The mother wound did not begin with silence alone, it began as women were shaped by the roles they were expected to play.

For generations, many of our mothers and grandmothers were defined by domestic life. They were the stay-at-home women who raised families, maintained homes, and measured their worth through duty and sacrifice. If they became single mothers, through divorce, abandonment, or widowhood, survival became their identity.

Then came the modern mothers, especially in Western culture, stepping into workplaces their mothers never entered while still carrying the full emotional load of home. The pursuit of equality brought progress, but it also brought exhaustion. Women were told they could have it all, yet no one mentioned the cost of doing it all.

So the mother wound did not come only from silence or comparison; it evolved through generations of women moving from one cultural paradigm to another, from being expected to stay home to being expected to do everything. And while these experiences differ across cultures, the tension is shared, the longing to be enough in a world that keeps changing the rules.

The lineage of the wound

My own mother loved me, and I loved her. We had what most would call a normal mother–daughter relationship, laughter, routine, shared moments, the kind of closeness that makes a family feel ordinary. But even in that, the wounds still formed. They were part of the maternal line, passed quietly from mother to daughter, each carrying the echoes of the one before.

My grandmother often spoke about how beautiful my mother was when she was young, and she was. Even later in life she was striking and adored. In our family, well, the maternal side anyway, appearance carried weight; it was the language of worth.

When I arrived, I did not fit the script. I was the fat kid, the nail-biter, the one who did not reflect the image they knew how to celebrate. My grandmother’s affection often came with bargains. Lose weight, grow your nails, and you will be rewarded. It was not cruelty; it was conditioning, the only way love had been taught to speak.

After a school assembly where the choir performed, my mother said, “Why aren’t you in the choir?” I could sing, but that was not the point. I already knew I was not like the other girls. Standing beside them on a stage would have made my difference impossible to hide. My comfort zone did not matter; belonging did. And even then, I knew that moment was not really about me, it was about her. She wanted to be part of that scene, to be one of the mothers smiling proudly from the rows of seats, not left out of the picture that defined belonging.

It showed up at the school athletics carnivals too. I never wanted to go, because the ending was always the same. No pretty ribbons for first, second, or third. Just last, every time, while the mothers sat in their deck chairs and cheered as their athletic daughters collected ribbons one after another. There were no ribbons for my mum. Let’s not mention swimming carnivals, where the ribbon count outcome was the same, and to top it off I was expected to wander around all day in a swimming costume.

The same story repeated in physical culture. I would sit on the floor while the other girls stood on stage with trophies, smiling in their matching leotards. It was not that anyone meant harm; they simply could not see what it felt like to always be the one left sitting, to know the outcome before it began. The push to keep going was not encouragement; it was expectation. Keep turning up, keep trying, keep pretending it does not matter.

And even as I write these words, I can feel that familiar voice rising, the one that says, do not sound like you are complaining. That is the conditioning too. The reflex to make it smaller, to make it sound reasonable, to protect others from discomfort. That is how deep the pattern runs.

Years later, during an argument, the kind mothers and daughters fall into when frustration and love get tangled, she said, “No wonder he hits you.” I cannot remember what started it, only the silence that followed. It stopped me completely. And then came the thought that marked the real wound. Is it my fault he hits me? That is how I gaslit myself, not because she asked me to, but because that is what I had been trained to do. To turn her words inward until they became mine.

That is the inheritance of the mother wound. It is not always created by what was done to us, but by what we learn to do to ourselves, and by the pain our mothers carried before us, often without knowing they were passing it on.

How it shows up

You might not realise you are carrying it until the same patterns start replaying. You over-function and keep the peace. You apologise for taking up space. You measure yourself against an invisible standard built on approval instead of authenticity.

It is the guilt that rises when you rest. The reflex to say “I’m fine” when you are not. The way you try to be easy to love because you were never taught you did not have to earn it. These are not quirks; they are inherited coping mechanisms.

When silence is not innocent

There is a difference between not knowing and not wanting to know. For some women, silence was survival; the conditioning ran deep, and speaking up felt dangerous. For others, silence became complicity, not in the name of love, but in the preservation of comfort, image, or denial.

We see it in families where fathers, or others known to the family, harm daughters and mothers “do not see”. Sometimes they truly cannot; their minds shut the door on what their hearts already know because acknowledging it would collapse the fragile structure of their lives. Other times, they choose not to look, because naming it would mean admitting they failed to protect.

That is not the inherited mother wound; that is complicity disguised as coping. And it is a wound of its own, the pain of realising your mother’s silence did not just fail to save you; it helped keep the secret alive.

Healing that kind of wound is not about forgiveness. It is about naming what happened so the next generation does not carry it as shame.

It is not about blame, until it needs to be

Understanding the mother wound means holding two truths at once, compassion for what she could not give and accountability for what she chose not to see. Most of our mothers did what they could within the limits of their own pain, but when silence allows harm to continue, love is no longer an excuse.

Naming that truth does not make you ungrateful. It makes you free.

How we begin to heal the mother wound

Healing does not mean rewriting history. It means recognising how those early lessons still live in us. It is learning to mother ourselves, to sit beside our own hurt instead of ignoring it, to say “That was painful” instead of “It does not matter”.

Some days that may look like resting without guilt. Other days it is saying no and trusting the world will not collapse. It is beginning to believe that being seen, exactly as we are, is safe.

Why this work matters

The mother wound is not a trend; it is a lineage. It shapes how we love, how we lead, and how we raise our children. When we begin to name it, we start to break the chain.

We model emotional honesty instead of perfection. We teach our children that love and truth can coexist, that seeing pain is not dangerous, it is healing. Healing does not erase the ache; it brings understanding to it.

I can now look back and see that my mother’s silence was not rejection; it was fear. She did not know how to hold my sadness because maybe no one ever held hers.

That is what the mother wound asks of us, to see our mothers not as the source of our pain, but as the first carriers of it. And when we stop waiting for them to say the right thing, when we say it to ourselves instead, we begin to close the gap.

Because that is where healing starts, not in blame, not in denial, but in the quiet courage to tell the truth about what shaped us, and to choose something different from here.

It ends with us when we find the strength to name the silence.

And it starts with us when we decide the story will change.