by Priya Malhotra
There’s a strange vulnerability in realizing that no one is coming to comfort you—and a stranger kind of strength in learning that maybe, just maybe, you can do it yourself.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the child I was. Not in some wistful, soft-focus way, but with the fierce clarity of someone trying to understand what was missing—not to assign blame, but to give name to the hunger. At seven, I needed safety. At fourteen, I needed space to be messy, dramatic, unsure. At twenty-seven, I needed someone to tell me I didn’t have to be so hard all the time. And now, I’m learning to become that someone for myself.
There’s a quiet revolution in that sentence—“I’m learning to become that someone for myself.” It sounds gentle, but it’s anything but. It has meant dismantling a scaffolding built over decades, composed of all the coping strategies that once helped me survive: perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-erasure, chronic competence. It has meant walking backwards through the house of my own memory, opening locked rooms, and saying to the younger selves still sitting there: I see you. I’m sorry. I’ve got you now.
No one teaches you how to do this. There’s no roadmap for re-parenting, no syllabus handed out at the start of adulthood that says: “Here is how you’ll hold the child inside you.” Instead, you notice the signs. The way you crumble after criticism. The way you contort yourself to avoid disapproval. The way you ache after certain holidays or scroll through photos of other people’s mothers and feel an inexplicable, wordless longing. The clues are scattered, like breadcrumbs leading back to the places where you first learned your worth was conditional.
What I’ve come to understand is that you can have loving parents and still be emotionally undernourished. You can be told you were cherished and still carry around the belief that your feelings were too big, your needs too much. The emotional inheritance of girlhood—especially in cultures where daughters are expected to be obedient, adaptable, selfless—is often silence. Be quiet. Be good. Be grateful. And for many of us, that silence calcifies into adulthood. We don’t throw tantrums anymore; we dissociate politely. We don’t wail when we’re hurt; we apologize. We don’t ask for help; we cope. And then we wonder why we feel brittle, unseen, exhausted.
Re-parenting, for me, has looked like unlearning this brittleness. It has looked like talking to myself in a voice I never heard growing up—one that is warm, firm, and merciful. It’s the voice that says, “You’re not lazy, you’re tired,” or “You’re not failing, you’re healing.” It’s the voice that lets me cry without rushing to fix it. The one that knows when to make soup and when to set boundaries. The one that reminds me I’m allowed to take up space, to change my mind, to not always be okay.
At first, this voice felt fake—like a performance of kindness, not the real thing. I’d say the right words, but not believe them. But over time, something shifted. The words began to land. I began to feel safer in my own presence. And that was the turning point: realizing I could be a safe place for myself. That I didn’t have to outsource that to a parent, a partner, or even a therapist. That I could mother myself—not perfectly, but consistently.
This doesn’t mean I no longer need others. Far from it. But it does mean I no longer enter relationships as a starving person hoping to be fed. It means I can receive love without mistaking it for oxygen. It means I can set limits without fearing abandonment. It means I can say, “This hurts,” without believing that makes me weak or ungrateful.
One of the most profound aspects of mothering myself has been reimagining how I deal with failure. Growing up, mistakes felt catastrophic, not because they were punished harshly, but because they were quietly disapproved of—registered in a slight shift in tone, a coolness in the room, a silence that said: Do better. Be better. So I learned to excel, to perform, to over-function. Praise became my currency. But it was also a trap, because it meant my worth was always negotiable—dependent on how well I did.
Now, when I make a mistake, I try to mother the version of me that’s panicking. I imagine putting a hand on her back and saying, “It’s okay. You’re still good. Nothing is broken.” It’s simple. It’s not poetic. But it’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever said to myself. And slowly, I’m rewriting the story. From “I have to earn love” to “I am allowed to be loved as I am.”
I think often about what we carry forward when we don’t stop to tend to what came before. The motherless mother. The daughter who mothers everyone but herself. The woman who’s praised for her strength but punished for her softness. These archetypes show up everywhere—in literature, in our families, in our reflections. And we emulate them without knowing we’re doing so. We become the stern caretaker to ourselves that our parents were to us. We mirror the very rigidity that once made us feel small.
But what if we didn’t?
What if mothering ourselves meant introducing gentleness where there was once judgment? What if it meant choosing curiosity over shame? What if it looked like checking in with ourselves as we would with a child: “Did you sleep enough? Do you need a break? Are you upset, or just overstimulated?” What if the goal wasn’t constant self-improvement, but deeper self-connection?
For me, this has taken many forms. Some of them quiet: journaling like a lullaby, forgiving myself at the end of a hard day, eating slowly, saying “no” without explanation. Some of them bold: ending relationships that echo old wounds, changing the way I work, demanding softness in places where I once performed steel. None of it has been linear. Sometimes I regress. Sometimes the old voices come back louder than the new ones. But the difference is: now I notice. And I respond. And I stay.
Perhaps the most radical part of mothering myself has been offering myself presence. Not fixing, not rescuing, not distracting—just staying with my own discomfort. Sitting beside the sadness without trying to escape it. Listening to my fear without shaming it into silence. This is the part no one talks about. That re-parenting is not just about affirmations and bubble baths. It’s also about bearing witness to pain you once dissociated from, and choosing to stay. Not to heal it instantly, but to honor that it exists.
Some days, I imagine a conversation with the younger versions of me. The seven-year-old who felt invisible. The teenager who never felt pretty enough. The twenty-something who kept dating emotionally unavailable people, hoping one of them would finally stay. I imagine telling them, “You don’t have to prove anything anymore.” I imagine them softening, just a little. Trusting, just a little. Beginning, just a little.
And that’s all I ask of myself. Not transformation. Not perfection. Just the willingness to begin again.
Re-parenting is a form of quiet rebellion. Against the parts of the world that told us we were too much. Against the internalized scripts that whisper we’re not enough. Against the legacy of deprivation we unconsciously inherit and perpetuate. It’s choosing to create a different lineage—one of presence, permission, and patience.
It’s not glamorous. No one gives you credit for it. But you begin to notice the changes. You don’t spiral as hard. You apologize to yourself less. You feel less brittle when someone doesn’t text back. You feel more grounded when things fall apart. And sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary day, you catch yourself laughing. Not performatively. Not for anyone else. Just for you.
And in that moment, you realize that this is what it feels like to be held.
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