There’s a particular kind of grief that doesn’t always have a funeral.
It’s not for someone who has died — but for someone who was never truly there.
It’s the quiet mourning for the mother we needed but never had.
The one who should have held us, guided us, and seen us — but instead left a hollow space where safety should have lived.
And the ache of that absence follows us into adulthood like a ghost that only we can hear.
We learn to mother ourselves in pieces.
We grow up fast, teaching ourselves how to survive, how to be strong, how not to need too much.
But beneath the competence and composure, there’s still that small child — the one who wishes someone had brushed her hair gently, said I’m proud of you, or noticed the way she was quietly breaking.
Chorus
But oh, the ache of what was never known,
The child inside still reaching for home.
God, hold the girl she couldn’t be,
Wrap her in love, set her heart free.
You are the arms she never had,
And then, there’s the ache when we see others with the mothers we prayed for.
The easy laughter, the phone calls, the way they can collapse into their mother’s arms without fear of judgment.
It’s like watching sunlight fall on someone else’s home while ours still sits in shadow.
We smile for them — and mean it — but inside, something tender curls inward.
Not from jealousy, but from longing.
Because no matter how much healing we do, there’s still a part of us that wonders what it would have been like —
to grow up feeling wanted.
To be nurtured without having to earn it.
To know softness before learning hardness.
And yet, this grief — as heavy as it feels — can become sacred ground.
In that emptiness, God often reveals Himself as El Shaddai — “the all-sufficient One,” the many-breasted God — the One who nourishes, comforts, and mothers the soul that was never mothered.
He teaches us to receive tenderness from His Spirit, to let Him reparent the parts of us that never got to rest in love.
Slowly, He helps us forgive what wasn’t, release what can’t be changed, and embrace what’s being healed.
We learn that we are not too needy, too broken, or too late — we were simply too unloved in the places we most needed nurture.
And from that revelation, compassion grows.
We become what we didn’t have.
We hold others the way we wished someone had held us.
We mother from the heart of God — not from our wounds, but from His wholeness.
The grief may never disappear completely, but it softens.
It stops being a raw ache and becomes a quiet remembrance —
of what we lost, of what we found in Him,
and of the strength it took to love without having first been loved that way.
🌹 Final Chorus (softer)
Oh, the ache of what was never known,
But now I’ve found my way back home.
God, You held the girl she couldn’t be,
You wrapped her in love, and set her free.
You are the arms she’ll always have,
You’re the healing for the motherless sad.
Now I can love, because You first loved me,
In the light of what’s been lost —
I’m free.
