The first time I heard the song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” tears sprang to my eyes before I even understood why.
An ache opened up in my chest, and I immediately felt guilty. I was about nine years old, and my mother was not absent. She was right there, trudging up and down stairs with endless loads of laundry, making school lunches, managing the relentless physical machinery of a household full of eight children. By any reasonable measure, she was working herself to the bone for us.
My mother gave me everything she had. What she couldn’t give was what she didn’t have herself.
What I couldn’t name then, and wouldn’t understand for decades, was the difference between being cared for and being nurtured. Between having your physical needs met and having someone tend to the emotional and spiritual truth of who you are. My mother gave everything she had. What she couldn’t give was what she didn’t have herself.
And so I cried myself to sleep and longed for something that had no name.
The Blind Alleys
That longing sent me down a series of blind alleys.
I sought love from codependent people who were just as lost as I was, each of us hoping the other held the answer. I trusted teachers and guides who didn’t have my best interest at heart. I went through my inheritance trying to prop up the illusion of being loved, surrounding myself with the trappings of abundance and belonging, hoping that if I created the right conditions, the feeling would follow.
No single catastrophe, just the slow erosion that happens when you keep looking for something in places it cannot be found.
It didn’t.
By the time I was in my early thirties, I was heartbroken and financially depleted. No single catastrophe, just the slow erosion that happens when you keep looking for something in places it cannot be found.
1986: The Revelation
And then, in 1986, I heard a concept that stopped me cold: The inner nurturing parent.
I didn’t fully understand it yet, but something in me recognized it. I knew, with a certainty I couldn’t explain, that no matter how hard I tried to find someone out there to finally give me what I was longing for, it was never going to happen until I did it first. So, I dove in and started learning.
The strangest thing happened. The more I learned, the more there was to unpack. I thought self-nurturing just meant being kinder to myself. Gentler. Cutting myself some slack. Those things mattered, but they were the beginning of the alphabet, not the language of nurturing itself.
The Language Itself
I’ve come to understand that cultivating this inner voice requires something deeply nuanced and sophisticated
Over the last forty years, I’ve come to understand that cultivating this inner voice requires something deeply nuanced and sophisticated. There were dozens of key distinctions to internalize. Myriad beliefs that needed to change at the root, not just the surface. There were other loud, familiar, well-practiced voices that obscured the signal of the true nurturing presence within. Learning to tell them apart was its own long education.
And at the center of it all, to love myself well, I needed to truly grasp what personal responsibility is. And what it most definitely is not.
Not blame. Not punishment. Not the harsh accounting of everything I’ve done wrong. Not dominating and controlling myself into compliance. But a depth of ownership that brings freedom and change.
It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s been deeply rewarding. Fun, even. I learned to trust that fiercely loving and bold inner voice. It might sound odd, but I’ve fallen a bit in love with her. She is the one who has helped my wildest dreams come true. She believes in me and I have grown to trust her, even when she asks a lot of me.
I’ve learned so much over the last four decades, and I am still learning.
The Voice That Was Always There
It was not withheld from me because I was unworthy of it. It was simply obscured, drowned out by louder, more familiar voices that had been with me since childhood…
What I know now that I couldn’t have articulated in 1986 is this: the voice I was looking for was always mine.
It was not absent. It was not withheld from me because I was unworthy of it. It was simply obscured, drowned out by louder, more familiar voices that had been with me since childhood, voices that I had mistaken for truth because they were so constant, so emphatic.
The motherless child in me was not, it turns out, without a nurturing mother. She had simply never been properly introduced to the one who had been there all along.
Lucid Moment: The voice you long for is yours.
Can you hear it? It may be obscured by louder voices, but it is there, and finding it is learnable. That is what I have spent forty years discovering, distinction by distinction. It’s my deepest wish for everyone I love.
So many people I know are longing for more… more peace, more freedom, more aliveness, more security, more joy. They’re working so hard to find these things. Trying so earnestly. But not getting where they want to go. Not because they aren’t serious enough, or trying hard enough, but because they never learned to cultivate this voice. Maybe they were never introduced to the mindset, the intentions, or the full dynamic range of what they can offer. Or they don’t yet know their Nurturing Parent is there, waiting, underneath the noise. Passionately committed to guiding your way.
I think it’s how we will find our way through this stormy passage and arrive at the new shore, whole and ready for the adventure ahead.
This is the central work of my lifetime. And as the world wakes up, I need to reach again for the next octave of self-love. I think we all do. I think it’s how we will find our way through this stormy passage and arrive at the new shore, whole and ready for the adventure ahead.
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