The Thread Between Us

Healing the motherline, softening the future, and becoming the woman your lineage needed.

The older I get, the more I realize—
we don’t just carry our own stories.
We carry hers too.
The mother who raised us.
The mother who raised her.
The line of women who came before us,
often loving without having been loved,
giving without ever having been asked how much it cost them.

They say trauma can be passed down through generations.
But so can healing.
And that’s why I do the work.

Not just for the daughters we may one day raise.
But for the mothers we once had.
For the parts of them that were never held.
For the voices they swallowed.
For the joy they were taught to suppress.

And when I talk about “the work,”
I don’t mean perfection.
I mean pausing before repeating an old pattern.
I mean saying no when silence would’ve been easier.
I mean asking for what was once unspeakable.
I mean making space for softness where hardness once ruled.
I mean learning to love ourselves in ways our mothers couldn’t.
And offering that love forward and back.

Because healing moves both ways.
Every time we speak the truth they couldn’t.
Every time we choose rest instead of resentment.
Every time we break a cycle with softness instead of silence,
something shifts in the thread behind us.
We become a living prayer, echoing back through the line.

And that’s the power of lineage work.
It’s quiet.
It’s sacred.
It’s slow.
But it ripples.
And you never quite know where the ripple ends.

So if you’ve been doing this work too,
if you’re learning to soften, to set boundaries, to speak your truth
please remind yourself: you’re not selfish.
You’re a bridge.

You’re the one rewriting the story.
Not just for the ones who come after you,
but for the ones who never had the chance to write their own.

And maybe that’s what it means to heal the motherline
to become the woman your lineage never got to be.
To give your mother, or hers, or the ones before her,
something they never knew how to ask for.
And to pass down something entirely different.

So today my pen is a quiet ode
to my own mother,
who gave me the kind of confidence she was never given,
who raised me to believe I could be anything,
even when she had learned to shrink.
I take so much of my strength from her
To my grandmothers,
whose silence held entire histories.
To the women before them,
whose names I may never know,
but whose tenderness I feel in my own hands
when I make something sacred out of an ordinary day.

And to the mother within me
the one who holds space,
who tends to life in all its fragile forms,
who knows how to nurture without needing a reason.
She, too, is blooming.
She, too, is rewriting the story.

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And if you feel the thread between you and the women in your life
—your mother, your daughter, your younger self—
this is your reminder: it’s never too late to tend to it with care.

This Sunday, the 11th of May on Mother’s, I’ll be co-hosting a beautiful gathering in Kuala Lumpur with Hannah Lo from WonderHer, for mothers and daughters who want to explore this thread through journaling, reflection and gentle but deep reconnection.

Maybe we’ll meet there.
And maybe we’ll untangle a piece of the story together.