The Absence of Soft Love

Soft Love, Learned Late, Part I

There’s a kind of love I didn’t grow up with.

I don’t mean love in the general sense. There was food. There was shelter. There were decisions made in the name of care. But there wasn’t softness. Not the kind that lingers. Not the kind that checks in. Not the kind that says, I see you, and I’m here with you.

I’m talking about soft love.

The kind that notices when your energy shifts. The kind that asks what you need before things fall apart. The kind that makes room for your emotions instead of managing around them.

I didn’t have that.

What I had was something else. Something more practical. More distant. Love that showed up in responsibility, not presence. Love that expected me to figure things out. Love that didn’t always make room for me to be soft.

So I adapted.

I became someone who could make decisions early. Someone who could take care of herself. Someone who could read a room without being taught how. Someone who could keep going without needing much.

At least, that’s what it looked like.

What it actually meant was that I learned how to live without being held.

And when you grow up like that, something subtle happens. You don’t go looking for softness. You don’t expect it. You don’t even always recognize it when it shows up.

You just move.

You build a life. You make choices. You become responsible. You become the kind of person who can take care of others, even if no one ever taught you how to do that gently.

There’s another layer to this that people don’t always like to talk about.

Motherhood isn’t always born out of softness or even desire. Sometimes it’s obligation. Sometimes it’s circumstance. Sometimes it’s a decision made in the middle of everything else you’re trying to survive.

I’ve made different choices in my life. I’ve chosen to continue pregnancies. I’ve also chosen not to. None of those decisions were simple, and none of them came from a place of having been deeply nurtured myself.

So when I say I became a mother without knowing what soft love felt like, I mean that in more ways than one.

When I became a mother, I did what I knew how to do.

I showed up. I handled what needed to be handled. I made decisions. I kept things moving.

And there is love in that.

But there is also a difference between love that sustains and love that soothes.

I didn’t know that yet.

I didn’t know what I was missing.

I only knew how to keep going.

I still have the picture of my mother at eighteen.

It’s one of my favorites of her. She looked cool without trying. Settled in herself in a way I didn’t have words for yet, but I recognized it.

The picture of me—the one I took years later because I wanted to look just as cool—is harder to find.

Maybe that says something. Maybe it doesn’t.

But I remember it.

So I went and got my own picture taken.

Back then, you didn’t need an appointment.

You went upstairs to this little studio, picked your background, and for twenty dollars you walked out with an 8x10, a couple of 5x7s, and a stack of wallet prints. It was quick. Twenty minutes, maybe. Everybody did it.

Not just for graduations. Not just for birthdays. Not for the kinds of photo shoots people do now in fields with golden-hour lighting and coordinated outfits.

This was different.

This was: it’s Saturday, you just got your hair done, you have a new outfit, and you want proof that you looked good in that moment.

That day, I felt good.

I had on a lime green sleeveless top. Lime green and black were my colors back then, and I had a few outfits that worked those colors hard. My hair was straight, cut into a pageboy right at my neck. No bangs, because I have never really been a bangs person. I had a job. I had just graduated. I was getting ready to leave for college.

I was stepping into something.

And I was proud of that picture.

When I brought it home, I showed it to my mom.

And the first thing she looked at was my arm.

Not my face.

Not the way I had put myself together.

Not the fact that I had tried to capture something I saw in her.

My arm.

I don’t even remember exactly what she said. I just remember the shift.

That quiet, familiar shift where something that felt good suddenly didn’t.

I didn’t have the language for it then. But I know now that was a moment where softness could have met me.

Someone could have said, You look beautiful.

Someone could have said, I see you.

Someone could have said, You did good.

Instead, I learned something else.

Something quieter.

Something that would take me years to name.