18/07/2025
My mother braided my hair every morning for twelve years. Perfect French braids that never came undone, not even after recess. She packed my lunches in brown paper bags with my name written in her careful cursive—the same way her mother had written hers, precise and distant. She saved every report card, every drawing, every ticket stub from school plays where I forgot my lines, preserving evidence of a childhood she was trying to love better than her own had been loved.
But she never asked me how I felt about anything, because no one had ever asked her.
Emily Durante's voice reading Jasmin Lee Cori's words felt like someone finally naming the ghost that lived in our house—the space between my mother's meticulous care and my soul's desperate hunger, the same hunger that had lived in her chest for decades before I was born. I was forty-three when I realized you can be perfectly tended and completely unknown, and that my mother had spent her whole life being both the tender and the unknown.
1. The Mother Who Counted Everything But Me
Cori writes about emotional absence like archaeology, unearthing what was never there. My mother counted calories, counted steps, counted the minutes until my father came home. She counted everything except the tears I swallowed at dinner, the way I practiced conversations with myself in the mirror, the silent scream that lived in my throat whenever she looked through me instead of at me.
She loved me with her hands but never with her eyes—because no one had ever shown her how to see. Fed my body but starved my spirit, passing down the same careful hunger her own mother had served her. Taught me to be seen but never to be known, because being known had always been dangerous in her world.
2. The Hunger That Has No Name
When Cori listed what children need to hear—"You are wanted, you are special, you are safe, you matter"—I felt something ancient and raw tear open. I realized I'd been waiting thirty years to hear those words from her lips, and that she'd been waiting sixty years to hear them from her own mother. We were both starving at the same table, reaching for bread that was never baked, neither of us knowing how to be nourished when we'd only ever learned to serve crumbs.
3. The Art of Vanishing While Present
I learned to disappear so well that sometimes I forgot I existed. Made myself paper-thin so I could slip through the spaces between her sighs. Became an expert at reading her moods like weather patterns, adjusting my entire being to match her atmospheric pressure. Cori calls this self-abandonment, but it felt like survival. How do you grieve learning to live as a ghost in your own life?
4. The Daughter Who Mothers Herself
Reparenting isn't pretty. It's holding yourself while you sob for the child who learned that love meant being convenient, while also grieving for the woman who could only love through logistics because emotions had always been too costly in her childhood home. It's speaking to your own reflection with the tenderness she never learned, forgiving yourself for needing what she couldn't give while forgiving her for not knowing how to give it. It's becoming the mother you needed while still loving the one you had—the woman who showed love through French braids and packed lunches because that's the only language of love she'd ever been taught.
Cori's book broke something in me that needed breaking. Not my love for my mother, but my need for her to be different than what her own story allowed. I closed it understanding that some wounds are inheritances, passed down through generations of women who loved imperfectly because they were loved imperfectly, each doing their best with hearts that had never been taught how to unfold. That my mother's silence wasn't cruelty—it was the sound of her own unhealed heart, the echo of all the words no one had ever said to her.
I am learning to hear my own voice again. It sounds like coming home. You can learn too.
FIND THE BOOK: https://amzn.to/44GSLTZ
You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.
