They say smell is the strongest trigger for memory, and I can tell you it’s true. The moment I opened that dusty cardboard box in my mother’s attic and caught the scent of her lavender hand cream mixed with old paper, I was eight years old again, watching her write at the kitchen table while I ate breakfast.
She’d been gone three months when I finally worked up the courage to sort through her things. At first, I almost tossed the stack of worn journals into the donation pile. But something made me pause, flip open the first page, and there it was—my name, written over and over in her careful script.
For fifty years, I’d carried around this quiet ache, this belief that my mother simply didn’t love me the way other mothers loved their kids. She never said it. Not once. While my friends’ moms showered them with “I love yous” at school drop-offs, mine would just nod and pat my shoulder. I thought I’d made peace with it, especially after becoming a parent myself. But sitting on that attic floor, reading page after page about me—my first steps, my broken heart at sixteen, her pride when I graduated, her worry when I struggled in my thirties—I realized I’d been completely, devastatingly wrong.
The weight of unspoken words
Growing up in a house where love was shown but never spoken shaped me in ways I’m only now beginning to understand. My mother cooked elaborate meals when I was sick, sat through every terrible school play, and somehow always knew when I needed new shoes before I asked. But those three words? They might as well have been in a foreign language.
I remember being maybe ten or eleven, working up the courage to tell her I loved her one night before bed. She froze for just a second, then squeezed my hand and said, “I know, sweetheart. Sleep well.” That was it. After a few more attempts with similar results, I stopped trying.
What I didn’t know then—what I couldn’t have known—was that she was writing it all down. Every single day, she wrote about me. About my sister too, but there were entire journals devoted just to watching me grow up.
“Tony seems sad today,” one entry from 1973 read. “I wish I could find the right words to comfort him. I made his favorite pot roast instead.”
Reading that, forty years later, I actually laughed out loud. Then I cried.
Learning love’s different languages
You know what’s funny? I became exactly like her. When my own kids were young, I was the dad who fixed bikes and built treehouses and showed up to every game, but saying “I love you” felt like trying to speak with marbles in my mouth. I’d convinced myself that actions spoke louder than words, that my kids would just know.
It wasn’t until I started therapy in my sixties (something my wife had been gently suggesting for years) that I began to understand this pattern. My therapist asked me a simple question: “What would it have meant to you if your mother had said those words?”
Everything. It would have meant everything.
That session was a wake-up call. I went home and told my adult children I loved them. Just like that. They were shocked at first—my daughter actually asked if I was dying—but now it’s become natural. Well, more natural anyway.
The stories we tell ourselves
Here’s what really gets me: for five decades, I told myself a story about being unloved, and that story shaped so many of my choices. I chose partners who were emotionally unavailable because that felt familiar. I kept people at arm’s length because I’d learned that’s what you do. I became an expert at fixing problems and solving crises because that’s how I’d learned to show care.
Meanwhile, my mother was pouring her heart out onto paper every night.
“Watched Tony with his new girlfriend today,” she wrote in 1979. “She seems to make him happy. I want to tell him to be careful with his heart, but I don’t know how to start that conversation. I hope he knows he deserves someone who treasures him.”
I remember that girlfriend. I remember wishing my mother would give me some guidance, some sign she cared about my relationships. Turns out she cared so much she filled three pages about it.
Finding forgiveness in understanding
As I’ve been processing all of this, I’ve had to confront some uncomfortable truths about myself. How many times did I do the exact same thing to the people I loved? How often did I assume they could read my mind, then resent them when they couldn’t?
My mother grew up in a household where emotions were considered weakness. Her journals revealed that her own mother—my grandmother—never said the words either. It was a chain of silence, passed down like a family heirloom nobody actually wanted.
But here’s what breaks my heart and fills it up at the same time: she tried to break that chain in the only way she knew how. Those journals were her rebellion against the emotional constraints she’d inherited. Every entry was an “I love you” she couldn’t speak aloud.
“Tony looked so tired today,” she wrote just two years before she died. “I wanted to hug him and tell him everything will be okay, but I made him soup instead. I hope he knows what I’m trying to say.”
Closing thoughts
I’m sharing this story because I know I’m not alone. How many of us are walking around with these wounds, these assumptions about how we’re loved or not loved, based on someone else’s inability to say the words?
If you’re reading this and recognizing your own family in these patterns, I want you to know two things: First, the love might be there, just in a language you haven’t learned to recognize yet. And second, it’s never too late to start saying the words yourself.
I can’t go back and tell my mother I understand now. I can’t thank her for those thousands of pages of love letters disguised as daily observations. But I can make sure this cycle stops with me. I can say the words she couldn’t, and maybe that’s its own kind of love letter to her.
So here’s my question for you: What love might you be missing simply because it’s being spoken in a language you haven’t learned to hear?
