I Don’t Feel Loved… Find the Tenderness You Desire and Deserve.

I don’t feel loved. The truth is I haven’t for the longest time.

Being a mum to tweens and teens is a hard, thankless, and mostly loveless role. 

This blog post starts my sobering journey of letting go of my expectations of how love should look. Let us explore where tenderness goes and how to find it once more. 

It’s time to get real

Many of us have a fantasy of how our relationships with our families, particularly our children, should be. An ideal brought about by not only our own values and opinions, but those of our friends, family and society. Although, what if reality falls short of this fantasy? And how can we find love when there seems to be none?

It’s time for me to reconsider how I receive love and affection. We are all only human. Connection is essential to us all, our wellbeing, and sometimes, our survival. 

What is life without love?

Don’t we all deserve to feel valued and cherished?

Where did the love go?

This morning the only one who greeted me in my household was Alexa. Is it weird, or perhaps more so sad, that I set her up to recognise my voice so that someone, or something, would value me enough to refer to me by name? My heart feels the sadness and the loneliness of this pathetic statement.

If you’re a parent too, you’ll know I’m referring to the need for my true persona to be seen. My children are all too aware of my not-so-secret identity of ‘Mum’. They summon her repeatedly in the hour and a half between them waking and leaving for school. 

I wonder, where did the love go? Why do I feel unseen and invisible? How did we get to this place and how do I find affection once more?

What once was

I often say to friends that I would take stinky nappies, sleepless nights, and toddler tantrums any day over parenting tweens and teens. To me, the earlier eras of motherhood felt so much easier to navigate. Perhaps I’m looking back on those times with rose-tinted specs, choosing to focus on the good moments and dismiss the not-so-good. Was I more equipped to navigate bedtime stories, pretend play, and soothing bumped knees than I am negotiating the complex emotions of teenagers? I might be willing to accept this idea, had I not devoted the last few years of my career to supporting young people to understand their thoughts and emotions.

For me, there is one huge difference between parenting younger children and tweens and teens: what you get back from them in return for all you give.

As little ones, I knew my children loved me. They showed me this in so many ways. By always being pleased to see me at the end of school. Hugging me every chance they got. When I told them I loved them, they told me back. If they were scared or hurt, mine and their dad’s were the only faces they wanted to see, the only hands they wanted to hold.

What now is

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment this changed. Maybe it happened gradually. But to me, it felt that overnight I’d gone from being their world, to being mostly just annoying to have around. I wish I could remember the last time my son said, “I love you too”. Or could recall every detail of the last time he snuggled up to me while I read him a story.

What about me?

I feel like so often we talk about parenting by the measure of how much love we show our children. But aren’t all strong and secure relationships about give and take? Isn’t connection a two-way street? It doesn’t make me a “bad mum” to admit that I miss my children. I want deeply the love they used to show me. Are we all grieving for how valued we used to be? Isn’t it ok to give your all and need something in return? I know that I don’t want to be someone who makes my children feel that they owe me anything, simply because I chose to love and care for them. But don’t we all need and want affection and connection?

How can I find love when there’s (nearly) none.

Read on and you will discover what I’m doing to find a connection with my children once more. As well as to find the tenderness I desire and deserve. I don’t have all the answers, just a few ideas that are working for me. In truth, I’m navigating brand new relationships. I’m in unfamiliar territory. But isn’t that, in a nutshell, what parenting is? Trial and error.

Is love hiding in plain sight?

Connecting with my son has been far from easy over the last few years. The truth is, he has changed in so many ways. I often miss the person he used to be. Accepting these changes has been a struggle, but, I think, an integral part of us rebuilding our relationship. I’m learning to see the affection he still offers, just in new and less obvious ways.

There are few times my son chooses to connect with me in comparison to when he was a child. Maybe because we have little in common now. However, those instances still exist. In our chaotic lives these moments of connection are easy to miss. But maybe I’ve just been looking for love in all the wrong places.

The special moments we share

It was a sad moment when my son stopped calling me Mum. Now he calls me Bean. His made-up name, just for me. As much as I long for him to refer to me as Mum again, when I think about it, it’s actually kind of cool. We have something that just the two of us share.

On the look out for affection

He rarely hugs me, but he’ll often play fight and pretend to wrestle me. It’s super annoying when I’m in the middle of cooking dinner or trying to talk to him about something important. But could this be his form of affection and closeness?

Little to say

He doesn’t have much to say, but now and again, he’ll seek me out to tell me about his day, whether to share an idea he’s had or vent about something that annoyed him at school.

When he was younger, he would tell me everything. It can get frustrating when your child has a severe case of verbal diarrhoea and zero filters. However, one day they stop talking and start grunting. You realise how much you miss hearing their voice.

I find it incredibly hard to connect with someone I rarely even communicate with. But I remind myself how much he must value my opinion to share his thoughts and feelings with me. Especially in what for him, has become a much quieter and considered way of being.  It’s hard to go from knowing the ins and outs of his life to just tiny snippets. But maybe, those tiny snippets that he chooses to share, mean that little bit more.

Cherish the compliments

Lastly, if you get a compliment from a teenager, hold it in your heart and treasure it for a lifetime. If they are willing to share their intimate feelings about your accomplishments or something they value in you with you or others, that my friend is pure gold!

My son tells his friends, “My Mum makes the best mac and cheese”. I’ll take it.

Choose connection over correction

Sometimes it feels like it’s all give and no take. My children are different people than the ones they used to be. Often, even liking them is a challenge. There are lots of things they do and say that I don’t agree with or like. At times, all we seem to do is disagree. Nevertheless, I’m making a conscious effort to choose connection over correction. To meet them where they are right now, rather than mourn for the people they used to be.

It’s hard. This means not always nagging at them and giving them a hard time about their choices. Despite often wholeheartedly disagreeing with their choices. It’s keeping my mouth shut when I think I know best and letting them find their way.

I am far from perfect. I still absolutely nag. Please show me a Mum who doesn’t. But I do it more selectively and choose my words more carefully.

I’m never going to stop telling my children that I love them or that I’m proud of them. No matter how much they coil in disgust. I’ll persevere and keep on asking them if they are ok when they seem a bit off. For the most part, this is of course infuriating to them, at least they act like it is. But, in those moments when my son opens up about what’s bothering him. Or my daughter out of the blue says, “I’m proud of you Mum”, I know I’ve got it right.

Find Love in Yourself

Self-love. Don’t I make it sound so easy? Find love in yourself! How hard can that be? For me, it’s the hardest thing of all. If you have read my posts, you will know that self-worth is an ongoing battle for me. It’s absolutely a process, a marathon, not a sprint.

What has helped me to fill the emptiness in my soul, isn’t convincing myself that I’m just great or loving myself and all my faults. I’m talking about giving yourself much-needed time to reconnect with you and to get to know yourself better.

For example, today’s one of those days that I feel invisible in my own home. Ultimately this sense of not being seen brings about all sorts of emotions that don’t feel great. Sadness, loneliness, anger, self-doubt. I could easily sit in those feelings and let them dictate my thoughts and intensify. In fact, that is what I did for most of this morning. Until I decided not to.

Spend time with you and your feelings

In an attempt to break the cycle of negative thoughts fuelling negative feelings, and vice versa, I took myself outside. I sat on the ground facing the sun and played calming music through headphones. I closed my eyes and just became present with myself. I checked in with my emotions and what was going on internally. But also, connected to that moment and just that moment, by focusing on my breathing.

Being fully present with myself is the start of showing myself love. Sometimes I need to give my valuable attention, which is normally on everyone else, to me, and only me. This simple 5-minute action changed my mind set and mood for the rest of the day. It was honestly the best thing I’ve done in ages. Maybe I’ll make those 5 minutes of me part of every day.

Finding love outside of your family

When my family doesn’t fill me up, or I don’t feel loved or connected, I’m beginning to look for bonds elsewhere. When I’m feeling lonely, I’ll reach out to my friends. The likelihood is that my friends are in loveless relationships with their children too. And there is nothing quite as restorative as a good old moan.

I know it’s not the same as feeling loved and appreciated by your immediate family. However, for me, it does fill the emptiness at least a little and lifts my mood.

Be honest about how you feel

It’s easy to keep the loneliness bottled up and plod along. For a long time, I’ve been treating myself like my feelings don’t matter, seeing my children’s needs as more important than my own. Ultimately, one day my children might be husbands, wives, and parents themselves. When they are do I want them to see themselves as inferior or unworthy of love and affection? Absolutely not! If I believe that children learn how to live through their parents, I need to be conscious of what I want to teach.

Now I can’t guarantee how telling your family how you feel will be received. Neither can I assure you it will bring about change. But it’s surely worth a try.

Also, I’m pretty sure that neither of my children sit awake at night planning how they can piss me off, or make me feel worthless. The opposite is probably true. Most children seek pride from their parents not disappointment. Despite often not feeling loved, I know deep down that my family loves me, and don’t want me to be unhappy. 

Learning to let go

What I have learned, through too much experience, is that getting to rock bottom and losing my shit is not the way to go. I know, I’ve done it, numerous times. Neither is playing the blame game. I’ve tried to refrain from using the word ‘you’ in most communication with my tween and teen. It rarely ends well. I’m still working on showing the same restraint to my husband.

However, calmly expressing how I am feeling and what I need, does seem to get through, now and then. As with most things with parenting tweens and teens, there’s an element of judging their moods and choosing your timing carefully. Yes, it’s frustrating to have to work your feelings around their ups and downs. I hear you. But I’ve concluded that what seems to be a lack of consideration and care on their part, is more likely to be an absence of skills they haven’t quite developed yet.

In conclusion, finding love and tenderness as a mother can be hard. It’s heart breaking to feel that you are giving your all and getting nothing in return. But just because we don’t always see the love we so desire, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Perhaps, if we change the places we look, we will find the connection we are longing for.