"Did I just say that?!" Every daughter knows the moment she hears her mother's words come out of her own mouth. This is your mother tongue — the inherited language of self-worth, self-doubt, and what it means to be a woman. Here's how we begin to change it.

She said it quietly, almost as an aside: "Being a parent now reminds me of my past." She is a physician, accomplished and deeply committed — and yet parenthood cracked something open she thought she had sealed. This is the wound of being unmothered. And it shapes everything.