Therapy’s Too Expensive, But Watching Me Online Is Free,A daughter’s love can’t compete with cheap holidays and self-pity.

 There’s a kind of grief no one prepares you for — the kind that hits when your mum is still alive, still living just across the road, and still choosing everything else over you.

She’s two minutes away.

She could knock. She could say sorry.

She could even sit in silence and just try.

But instead… she stalks.

She taps through stories like she’s flipping channels.

Watching, always watching.

Not to understand. Not to grow. Just to gather enough crumbs to feel like she’s still “involved” — in a life she won’t admit she broke parts of.

Because therapy?

Too expensive.

Accountability?

Nah, that’s not in the budget.

Better save for that all-inclusive trip and the new outfit for someone else's birthday party — the one you’ll show up to smiling, pretending your daughter’s absence is her fault.

Spoiler: it's not.

What I needed wasn’t money.

It wasn’t grand gestures or Facebook posts pretending we’re close.

It was you. Present. Healing. Willing.

Even just a text that said, “I’m sorry I got it wrong, but I want to get it right.”

Instead, I got gossip.

Instead, I got silence.

Instead, I got to explain to my children why Nanny doesn’t show up unless it’s through the screen — and even then, only when she thinks no one’s looking.

You chose the version of me you can control:

The filtered one. The online one.

Not the real, raw, messy, human version who cried herself to sleep wondering why she was never enough.

I’ve already mourned the mum I needed.

That grief? I’ve done it. Sat in it. Screamed into pillows and unravelled the knot of it during sleepless nights.

You don’t get to reappear now and rewrite history — especially when you won’t even acknowledge the damage, let alone apologise.

The weirdest part?

I’d have done the work.

I wanted to fix it.

I begged for years, didn’t I?

But you told me it wasn’t that bad. You rolled your eyes when I spoke my truth. You picked apart my emotions like they were inconveniences, not cries for help.

So yeah. I blocked you.

Not because I hate you.

But because loving you was costing me my self.

Because I can’t keep letting someone who won’t heal their own wounds keep slicing open mine.

Now you linger in the shadows of my stories, trying to piece together the life you chose not to be part of.

But you can’t screenshot a relationship.

You can’t bookmark a bond.

And you don’t get to say “I miss you” when all you’ve done is make sure you’re missed by staying silent when it counted.

I hope the holiday’s nice.

I hope the sun makes you forget what it feels like to be in the cold.

Because over here, I’ve been building something warm — a family that feels like safety, like laughter, like everything I never got from you.

And you? You’re welcome to join us.

But not until you stop lurking and start doing.

Not until you sit with a therapist and say, “I think I hurt her.”

Not until you care more about healing the actual wound than pretending it was never there.

Until then…

I hope my stories are entertaining.

I hope you like the blog.

You’ll find no secrets here — I’m not ashamed of my life.

Just ashamed that the one person who was meant to protect me turned out to be someone I needed protection from.

You can watch me grow.

But you don’t get a front-row seat anymore.

Healing is still on the table.

But the chair has your name on it, not mine.

So pull it up, or keep standing outside the window.

Either way — I’m done begging you to come inside.