One of the strangest parts of adulthood is realizing your parents are not only Mom and Dad. They are people. People with wounds they never healed, habits they never questioned, limitations they may or may not ever come to see clearly. And sometimes motherhood is the season that finally makes you see it.
I did not expect that becoming a mother would change how I understood being a daughter. But it has. I now have children who genuinely depend on me, whose needs are not optional to meet, whose wellbeing shapes how I spend my energy every single day. And having that kind of responsibility has made me far more aware of where my own emotional capacity actually goes.
I did not realize how complicated honoring your mother without losing yourself could become until motherhood made me more aware of what I was carrying.
Motherhood Made Me See What I Could Not See Before
For a long time, I did not question how I had learned to love the people closest to me. I simply lived it out. I was the dependable one. The one who said yes. The one who kept the peace, absorbed what needed absorbing, and made sure everyone around me stayed comfortable, sometimes at real cost to myself.
Motherhood interrupted that pattern, not with a dramatic moment, but with a slow, quiet clarity. I started asking myself questions I had never let myself ask before. What relationships are drawing from the emotional capacity I need for my children? Where have I been accepting responsibilities that were never actually mine to carry? Once I started asking, I could not stop noticing the answers.
When Love Became Overfunctioning
I was taught, directly and indirectly, that loving family well meant sacrificing yourself. Very few boundaries. Tolerating what was uncomfortable. Being the one others could count on no matter the cost to you. I do not think this was ever named to me as overfunctioning. It was simply called love.
I am still learning what my relationship with my mother looks like now that I can see this pattern clearly. I am still learning how to love her without automatically stepping back into the role I was trained to play. Seeing the pattern has not made the relationship simple. It has just made it honest, and honesty has required me to slow down and actually think about what love and honor require of me, rather than defaulting to whatever kept things comfortable for everyone else.
Honor in the Lord: What Ephesians 6 Actually Teaches
Scripture is not silent on this. Ephesians gives a clear instruction:
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise;
“That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.”
Ephesians 6:1-3 (KJV)
As an adult daughter, I am not a child under daily parental authority in the same way I once was, but the call to honor my father and mother still matters before the Lord.
Honor is not optional for me. It is right, and it comes with real weight in Scripture. But honor is also more specific than I once assumed. Honor does not automatically mean unlimited access to my life. It does not mean carrying a parent’s emotional burdens as though they were mine. It does not mean making myself responsible for how someone else feels, or pretending painful things did not happen so the relationship can look untroubled from the outside.
What honor can look like, practically, has become clearer to me the more I have sat with this. It can look like refusing to speak maliciously about her, even when I am hurt. It can look like praying for her, genuinely, not as a performance. It can look like speaking respectfully whenever we do communicate, and forgiving repeatedly when old feelings resurface, because they do resurface. It can look like refusing to retaliate, even when retaliation would feel justified in the moment.
But honor, as far as I can tell in Scripture, does not require returning a relationship to the exact access level it once had. Those are two different questions, and I had spent years treating them as the same one.
Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Access Are Not the Same Thing
This distinction has mattered more to me than almost anything else in this season. Forgiveness is what I release before God. It is refusing to let bitterness or the desire to punish take up residence in me. That is something I can do regardless of what the other person does or does not do.
Reconciliation is different. It involves both people, and it often requires truth, repentance, changed behavior, and time to rebuild trust that was broken. I cannot manufacture reconciliation alone, no matter how much I might want to.
Access is a third, separate question entirely. Forgiving someone does not automatically obligate me to give them unrestricted access to my life, my children, or my peace. I can forgive fully and still be wise and prayerful about what access looks like now. Holding these three things as separate rather than treating them as one bundled requirement has been one of the most freeing shifts in how I think about this relationship.
When Motherhood Makes You Grieve Being a Daughter
There is a particular kind of grief that shows up once you become a mother yourself. I find myself thinking, I want to be there for my children. I want them to know they can call me. I want to notice when they are struggling before they have to say it out loud. And in noticing my own instincts toward my children, uncomfortable questions have surfaced about my own experience as a daughter. Where was that for me?
I do not ask that question to become consumed with what I did or did not receive. I ask it for clarity, so I can understand what I am carrying, what I have normalized, and what I genuinely do not want to repeat with my own children. That is not bitterness. That is a mother trying to parent with open eyes.
“When My Father and My Mother Forsake Me, Then the LORD Will Take Me Up”
“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.”
Psalm 27:10 (KJV)
This verse has become an unexpected comfort to me, not because I believe I have been entirely abandoned, but because it names something true. God is not limited by what our earthly parents were or were not able to give us.
There have been honest prayers underneath that verse for me. Lord, I wanted my mother. I wanted somebody to notice without having to ask. I wanted support without having to beg for it. I wish some things had been shown to me differently. I no longer feel the need to sanitize those sentences before I bring them to God. They can be prayer exactly as they are. He does not need me to soften the ache before He is willing to meet me in it.
What Obedience Looks Like in This Season
The question I keep returning to is not how do I change my mother, because that was never mine to control. The question has become, Lord, how do You want me to walk now that I can see this pattern clearly?
Practically, that has looked like praying before I respond instead of reacting from old habit. It has looked like not accepting every emotional burden that gets handed to me. It has looked like telling the truth respectfully rather than staying silent to keep the peace, and reducing access where it is genuinely needed, without turning that decision into a public accusation. It has looked like refusing to gossip, bringing my actual resentment honestly to God instead of pretending it is not there, and letting the relationship be what it currently is rather than forcing it back into a shape that no longer fits.
I cannot control whether the people I love become who I needed them to be. But I can decide, before God, who I will become now that I can see the pattern clearly.
What Obedience Looks Like This Week
This week, obedience might look like praying honestly about one relationship where you have been overfunctioning, and asking God to show you the difference between honoring someone and carrying what was never yours. It might look like forgiving without requiring the relationship to look exactly as it did before. It might simply look like bringing your disappointment to God instead of making resentment your home.
For the Mama Learning to Honor Without Losing Herself
If this is a tension you recognize in your own life, whether with a parent, a sibling, or anyone you have habitually overfunctioned for, the 5-Minute Faith Reset is a gentle place to start. A short, fully written printable with a KJV verse and a surrender prompt, made for the moments you need to bring an honest thing to God instead of carrying it alone.
You Might Also Love
Surrender Didn’t Make the House Quiet. It Made Me Quiet in the House.
If Jesus Is Lord, Why Am I Still Carrying Motherhood Like It All Depends on Me?
Share This With a Mama Who Needs It
If you know a mama who is quietly learning the difference between honoring someone and overfunctioning for them, send this to her. Sometimes the most helpful reminder is that she is allowed to love someone without losing herself in the process.
Closing Encouragement
I do not have this fully figured out. I am still learning what this relationship looks like now, still learning how to honor without overfunctioning, still learning that forgiveness does not require pretending. But I know this much. I can bring my disappointment to God without making resentment my home. And when earthly relationships leave places in me still aching, I can let the Lord meet me there.
Love,
Kay
View comments
+ Leave a comment