My Inheritance 

My mother kept me in a karmic position in life—karmic people, karmic situations—and she was always right there to speak confusion into my natural thoughts of clarity. 
There were many times in my journey when all could have been forgiven alongside a profound acceptance and healthy distance from my personal life and choices. After all, it is our responsibility to mature and align, given a willingness for growth. But she continued to make things harder for me because of her own internalized struggles. I didn’t need to be in the room to be a victim of her manipulation. 

The Core Understanding 

Narcissistic parenting passes through generations like a genetic mutation. It is rooted in one’s understanding—or lack thereof—of the core principles of self-love, not in the simplistic perception that daughters try to do everything differently from their mothers and fail. That’s a surface-level understanding. 

The inheritance of narcissistic mothering creates trauma that can take years to unpack, understand, and reframe. 

My Story at Fifteen 

I became a mother at fifteen—not because I was rebellious or unreceptive to guidance—but because I spent most of my life highly impressionable to anyone who met even a small criterion for admirable worth. I created a mental platform to look up to for care and approval, positioned above my own thoughts and truths. 

I suppose I’ve been more comfortable seeing feet than I ever realized when chasing people’s acceptance—but I digress. 

My inherited understanding of life, people, and love made me exploitable. Rare but formidable opportunities to rewrite that understanding were missed due to my constant need to fix a problem by the only means I had ever known: seek help. 

At fifteen, pregnant and emotionally shut down, I had no understanding of who I was, let alone the mother I was planning to be—beyond the basics of formula measurements and clothing styles. 

My mother’s incessant need to call me a “sad disappointment” was always more confusing than emotionally degrading. The word disappointment was incongruent with her own understanding of parenting. 

The Missing Foundation 

While there was a shared understanding that teen pregnancy was “wrong,” there was no real teaching about behavior, responsibility, or even how—or why—she herself had become a mother at twelve. 

Like many others of her generation, my mother spent my childhood with her life’s truths swept under an invisible rug. History was not held under a microscope and dissected for its lessons. The result was wasted opportunities and repeated behavior. 

It was a daycare employee—not my mother—who explained the limitations that having a child so young would have on my life. When my pregnancy test came back positive, my mother simply told me I needed to explain why I was “doing this” to her life. 

I remember sitting in genuine confusion, feeling stupid because I didn’t understand what she meant. 

I believe my mother’s only understanding of pregnancy was that it resulted in having children; the accountable steps, preventative measures, and actions needed to build a functional life afterward were foreign to her. 

Yet, just as confusing, she created blockages and intentional confusion around age-appropriate experiences that might have helped me grow. 

What Was Actively Taught 

What was actively taught and encouraged was emotional detachment in relationships, invalidation, and a focus on whether a romantic partner was attractive. 

My mother and I never had conversations about what it meant to be loved; this would have been too nuanced for her—an admitted result of the lack of emotional support from her own mother. 

Her criterion for an “appropriate” boyfriend was how attractive she found him—often sitting on our porch, staring at my teenage boyfriend, reveling in how handsome she thought he was. 

Just as her mother had made missteps in parenting, she somehow expected a different result while repeating similar foundational behaviors—those rooted in self-worth issues disguised as parenting. 

Despite both my close-in-age sibling and me becoming teen mothers around the same time—an opportunity ripe for reflection—I found wiser counsel in overtly critical strangers than in my mother, who spent much of that period portraying herself as a martyr in her own hardship. Hardship that we caused. 

While it’s undeniable that our pregnancies created financial strain for her, it’s equally undeniable that my sibling and I did not understand what we were being taught or why. We once shared a quiet moment of truth—acknowledging how wrongly we had been taught—and never spoke of it again until adulthood. 

The Pattern 

Any activities I joined, from grade school to college, were a direct result of my own initiative. My mother hated being bothered to attend a show we were in. She refused to sign us up for clubs or teams—even when they were free. 

We learned to involve ourselves early on. Yet, whenever we did, she inserted herself in ways that made us question our worth or ruined the experience through some “incident” involving her. 

When others tried to encourage us, she added non-neutral input that left us uncertain—only for us to later discover her words were false or discouragingly misleading. 

When confronted, she would rage, then eventually apologize with a long story about her mother or what she once wanted for herself. These stories didn’t explain why she intentionally sabotaged what she recognized as a way forward for me. 

I spent much of my undergraduate years feeling like an impostor—learning the emotional aptitude that others seemed to have gained naturally through coming-of-age experiences. 

In contrast, my mother’s perception of my education is that my degree is hers—that I should scratch off my name and give it to her for every time she was my “underpaid babysitter.” 

Even if her memory of an event was imaginary, in her mind it happened, and I owed her for it. 

It doesn’t matter that I graduated over ten years ago and later earned an MBA. In her eyes, any positive experience in my life where she might have “loaned me assistance” must be paid for—at a never-ending price. 

It is exhausting, depleting, and unbeatable all at once. 

Understanding the Root 

My mother has been the hardest relationship of my life—and it took years just to understand her, and myself, through her. 

Narcissistic parenting passes through generations like a genetic mutation. Had she loved herself, she might have spent more time seeking her own experiences rather than clawing at the opportunities she saw her children create. 

Had she given herself the compassion and protection her own mother denied her, she might have understood love beyond the physical and built, brick by brick, a foundation of emotional maturity. 

Had she granted herself permission to challenge inherited beliefs and place accountability where it belonged, she wouldn’t have felt slighted watching others do just that—learning to care for themselves. 

The inheritance I received wasn’t just behavior or pattern—it was absence. 

My mother could not teach what she never possessed: the ability to love oneself enough to allow others to grow beyond you. 

She kept me in a karmic position not out of cruelty, but because it was the only position she knew. She spoke confusion into my clarity because that clarity threatened her—it meant I might no longer need her. 

I have spent years carefully unraveling my experiences, trying to understand why she did what she did. It is not by chance that I was able to grow beyond that karmic place, those old ways, that old self. 

My soul breathes in the concept of Sankofa—and exhales the losses and missed opportunities, carefully holding the truth. 

There is nothing fruitful for me under that old umbrella of understanding. I have grieved who and what I was—and who those women before me were. 

And it is with a light heart that I sail into something else. 

Healing, for me, has become the quiet confidence of no longer seeking permission to exist and living in fear of taking up space—proof that even those raised in shadow can learn to stand fully in their own light.