Chasing Mother's Love: How a Lifetime of Longing Shaped My Relationships — and How I Finally Broke the Chain

By Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW

Today is Mother's Day. And every year, without fail, it finds me in the same place — somewhere between profound gratitude and a grief that never quite finishes what it started.

My mother died sixteen years ago. And most days, I still cannot look at her photograph.

That sentence used to confuse me. How do you love someone so deeply — someone you are still, actively, in the middle of missing — and not be able to hold their gaze, even in a frame? How does love and pain live so completely inside the same breath?

The answer, I've come to understand, is that they always did. Even when she was alive.

— — —

Her name was Sylvia. Judge Sylvia Pressler. And she was, by every measure the outside world used to take stock of a person, extraordinary.

She sat on the New Jersey Appellate Court at a time when men owned those rooms. She was sharp, principled, and relentless — a woman who showed up in spaces where women were not expected and stayed. She was charitable to her core, generous with her time and resources in ways that touched more lives than I could ever count. She made the world genuinely better. I was proud of her. I am still proud of her.

She just couldn't seem to find thirty minutes for me for lunch. I asked her. Repeatedly, across decades. Not in an obsessive way just occasionally asked her.

I'd call, and before I could finish a sentence, I could feel her already stepping away from the phone — voice pleasant, tone efficient, attention aimed somewhere else. She always had somewhere to be. I just never felt like it was toward me.

She didn't say she loved me until a few days before she died. I said it first, and she said it back. I have held onto that moment like a talisman. It helped. It still helps. But I would be lying if I said it erased the years that came before it — the years of reaching, and reaching, and reaching, and landing just short of her arms.

— — —

Here is what I know now, as a psychotherapist with nearly four decades of clinical experience: we learn who we are and what we deserve inside the very first relationship of our lives. Our mothers — or whoever occupies that first crucial attachment role — hand us our operating system. Not intentionally. Not maliciously, in most cases. But thoroughly.

My mother did not think my work as a psychotherapist and social worker amounted to much. She said that psychotherapists were “quacks.” That my brother’s psychiatrist made him worse. When I spoke about theory or my job, the silence around it, the polite pivot to other topics, the absence of any pride in what I did — that communicated everything. She never came to watch the football games that I cheered. I was the captain one year and co-captain another, and the one time she came to watch the football game she (and my father and brother) left halftime, when we, the cheerleaders were performing. I watched them walk out, on the field, as we set up to perform. When I came to her to help me with math as a child, she gave me the answer before I even had time to think about it. I felt I was unworthy of her time and love. That’s how it felt anyway. And somewhere deep in my nervous system, I filed it away: your worth is questionable. Your love must be earned. The people who matter to you will always be slightly out of reach.

That filing cabinet followed me straight into every romantic relationship I ever had.

The pattern was always the same in the beginning. Dazzling. Someone who wanted to be with me, who made time, who made me feel — and this is the word I keep returning to — chosen. And that feeling, for someone whose earliest understanding of love included a lot of waiting and wondering, was intoxicating.

Then, slowly, the dynamic would shift. I couldn't always tell you exactly when or how. But I would find myself, again, in the familiar posture: leaning forward, asking for more, chasing approval, chasing presence, chasing the reassurance that I was worth someone's attention, even minimally. The person in front of me would recede just enough to keep me reaching. And I would reach — because that is what I knew how to do.

In my work with clients, I call the internal voice that keeps us in these patterns the Traitor Within. It is the part of us that absorbed the wounds of our early attachments and translated them into a blueprint for safety and love — a blueprint that, without intervention, we follow faithfully even as it leads us somewhere painful.

It took me a very long time — and a great deal of my own therapeutic work — to understand that self-worth cannot be sourced from another person. Not a partner. Not even a mother. The approval I spent my life searching for in her eyes, and then in the eyes of the people I loved after her, was never something they could give me. Not because they were incapable of love, but because that particular gift can only ever come from within.

I know that intellectually, I was loved by my mother the best way she could. She provided for me. She kept me physically safe. She showed up in the ways she knew how.  I just didn't feel loved or emotionally safe.

She has been gone sixteen years now. And I miss her in ways that still catch me off guard — in a song, in a particular slant of afternoon light, in moments when I want to pick up the phone and tell her something and remember, all over again, that I can't.

People sometimes assume that when grief is too heavy to hold — when a photograph is more than you can face — there must be some darkness underneath it. Some unfinished anger, some wound that never healed. But that isn't it. When I cannot look at her picture, it is not because of anything broken between us. It is because I loved her so completely that the loss of her still takes my breath away. The pain is not in spite of the love. The pain is the love, with nowhere left to go.

That is one of the most disorienting things about complicated mother-daughter relationships: the grief, when it comes, is proof of exactly how much was there. If I had not loved her so deeply, the missing would not be so profound. The very magnitude of what I lost — and what I had always hoped for — lives in that photograph. That is why I sometimes cannot look.

And that is okay. People are complex. Relationships are complex. We can carry love and loss and longing and pride all at once, in the same heart, without any of those things canceling the others out.

— — —

This Mother's Day, I want to tell you what my greatest gift to my own children has been — and it is not anything they can hold in their hands.

My mother's mother handed her something. My mother, without meaning to, handed some of it to me. Intergenerational trauma does not announce itself. It arrives quietly, wrapped in familiar patterns, dressed in the emotional vocabulary we absorbed before we had words for any of it.

I decided, somewhere in the middle of my own healing, that the chain would stop with me.

Not perfectly. Not in one grand gesture. But in the daily, deliberate, sometimes exhausting work of noticing — noticing when I am operating from fear, when I am replaying old patterns instead of choosing new ones, when my Traitor Within is steering and I have forgotten to take back the wheel.

I have done that work. I continue to do that work. And I believe, with everything I have, that my children feel chosen by me. That they do not have to wonder. That the lunch always happens. That the phone call doesn't end before they're ready. That the love is said out loud, and often, and long before the final days.

That is my Mother's Day gift to them. The work I did so that they wouldn't have to.

— — —

Mom — I loved you. I love you still. I am proud of every room you walked into and refused to leave. I understand now, better than I ever could have while you were here, that you gave what you had. That you too had a Traitor Within and your own trauma and wounds. And I forgive what you couldn't.

I just wish we'd had that lunch.

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Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, hospice social worker, and creator of the Traitor Within framework. Hernovel, Traitor Within: How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Herto Abandon Herself will be available this summer and YourTraitor Within Journal is available now. Listen to the Your Traitor Within podcast wherever you listen.