The Ache of Loving a Parent Who Cannot Love You Back

Dr. Kiley Dunne Lizama, DSW LMFT

There are griefs that the world knows how to name. Deaths that come with rituals and prayers, with neighbors who stop by carrying food, with words spoken at gravesides. Those griefs have shape, ceremony, acknowledgment.

And then there is this one; the grief of a parent who still lives but will never give you what you need. No rituals for it. No language to carry it. Only silence.

You may feel it when you hear their voice on the phone, a voice that still belongs to the person who raised you but has never truly known you. You may feel it when you remember the younger version of yourself—hopeful, waiting, inventing stories about a day when they might finally look at you with softness. You may feel it when you watch tenderness pass between others, and something inside you aches in recognition of what you missed.

This grief is not clean. It is layered with guilt, with longing, with envy. It sits in your chest like a stone, and even when you think you’ve accepted it, it shifts, reminding you it is still there.

In our cultures, we are taught loyalty to parents is sacred. To speak of what was missing can feel like betrayal. But the truth remains: you can be grateful for life and still mourn the absence of love. You can honor where you come from and still admit the soil was hard, the roots shallow.

Grieving a living parent is a quiet unraveling. It is saying goodbye to the childhood you should have had. Goodbye to the parent you hoped they’d become. Goodbye to the reconciliation you once imagined might save you. These goodbyes don’t happen once. They repeat in small moments, like the way memory repeats itself: a smell of incense, the scrape of a familiar phrase in your own mouth, the sound of a song that reminds you of the years you kept waiting.

And maybe you know this too: sometimes you rehearse conversations you will never have. You imagine the apology that will never come, the warmth that never arrives. And when those imaginings dissolve, they leave behind the sharp ache of recognition—you are still grieving, even without a death.

This is a loss of possibility. A loss of being carried, of being chosen, of being loved without condition. It lingers like dust over everything, a sepia film that softens the edges of memory while keeping the ache sharp.

But here is the tender truth: you do not have to keep waiting. You are allowed to name the absence for what it is. You are allowed to grieve it as real, because it is. You are allowed to release the hope that they will change.

And in doing so, you may begin to turn toward yourself. Toward the younger version of you who deserved more. Toward the present version of you who can create the tenderness that was missing. Toward the possibility of love that doesn’t demand you shrink, prove, or beg.

This does not erase the ache. The nostalgia bone still throbs. The sepia tones remain. But in the act of naming this grief, you reclaim something: the chance to parent yourself with gentleness, to honor what you lost without letting it hollow you completely.

The world may never bring you casseroles for this kind of mourning. But you know it is real. And in that knowing, you are less alone.