the good mother vs the bad mother
The Good Mother:
She is warm.
She is present.
She nurtures without conditions.
She creates a safe emotional home where her child can grow, make mistakes, and still feel loved.
The Good Mother empowers. She teaches through patience. She listens more than she speaks. Her love is not earned — it’s simply given.
When you grow up with the Good Mother, you learn to trust your own feelings. You learn that you matter, that your voice deserves to be heard. You grow up believing the world is a safe place to be seen.
The Bad Mother:
She is absent — emotionally, physically, or both.
She is reactive, resentful, or manipulative.
She uses guilt instead of grace.
She demands perfection, control, or silence.
The Bad Mother may not realize the damage she's doing. Maybe she’s operating from her own wounds. Maybe she was never mothered herself. But her pain leaks onto her children, and that pain can feel like rejection, abandonment, or betrayal.
When you grow up with the Bad Mother, you learn to survive. You learn to shrink, to perform, to please. You may chase love in all the wrong places, or push it away because you don’t trust it.
The Truth Is:
Most mothers are both.
Because mothering is complicated.
Because healing isn’t linear.
Because love and harm can, heartbreakingly, exist side by side.
This is not about blame. This is about clarity.
This is about acknowledging that some of us are still reparenting our inner child from the wounds of a Bad Mother, while learning to forgive — or even celebrate — the parts of her that did show up with love.
It’s also about redefining what mothering really is:
It’s not just birthing a child — it’s nurturing life.
And that life might be within your own self.
So today, whether you had the Good Mother, the Bad Mother, or something in between — give yourself grace.
Maybe your healing will allow you to break the cycle.
Maybe you are mothering yourself in ways she never could.
Maybe you are learning that you can be the mother you always needed.
And that… is powerful.
