She Did the Best She Could

By Aron Strong, LMFT

“She did the best she could.”

It’s true. His mother worked two jobs to support them. She wasn’t uncaring. She was tired. And he’s not angry, that’s true as well.

But every time he says it, something in him huddles down. The eight-year-old who made his own dinner knew his mother loved him.

So you make the accurate case — that a tired parent is still an absent one, that explaining a harm away doesn’t undo it. He struggles to see your point, though. The more you try, the harder he resists. You can see how the story protects him. You want him to see it too.

He defends her, of course. You argue your point, he remains loyal, and the story is reinforced because of the pressure.

A blocking narrative isn’t a thinking error. It’s load-bearing. My mom still loved me holds his mother where he needs her — good, present, caring. Take it away and he doesn’t get relief, he becomes an orphan.

So we don’t correct it. We expand it.

The goal is a truer truth, not a correct one. A correct truth is that he was effectively abandoned and alone. A truer truth holds everything the old story held plus what it was leaving out, which means he doesn’t have to lose anything to accept it.

She worked because she loved him. And he was left alone. And the aloneness left a mark. He still carries the experience that another’s love doesn’t penetrate the loneliness. Love may be true but it feels far away.

An eight-year-old can’t metabolize absence as logistics. His nervous system filed it as no one is coming regardless of why. A truer truth holds conflicting truth. It represents something larger than either alone. Wholeness isn’t necessarily resolution, it lives in connection to our whole selves, in the good and the bad.

You invite him to hold one feeling active in his chest as you slowly raise the other feeling to sit alongside it. The presence of both registers as congruence. A more accurate expression and memory of what the eight-year-old him felt but couldn’t hold.

What shifts isn’t his opinion of his mother. It’s that the hurt is no longer an accusation. It’s just what happened to a kid who was by himself a lot, and left him struggling to truly feel connected to others in his life who love him, but whom he holds at a distance.

And then he can finally feel the whole of it, which was the point. The story was never the target. It was the door to deeper work.