✦ The Modern Heiress

This is for the daughters who mothered themselves. Who rose without soft hands to guide them, but still chose softness anyway.

I was introduced to womanhood not with guidance, but with absence.

My relationship with my mother was never foundational. I lived most of my early life being cared for by someone else, a maternal figure who was not my birth mother but who tended to my daily needs while my parents chased demanding careers. She was consistent and kind, but she could only do so much. After her, my grandmother became the next presence in my upbringing. My actual mother only came into the picture when I was around sixteen, by which time I had already formed my identity through distance and independence.

At sixteen, I entered a prestigious all-girls school and lived in a dormitory. It was a proud achievement, but even there, womanhood felt like something I had to study, observe, and simulate. Not something I was taught. After that, I lived with my mother briefly, but the bond was already fractured. She wasn’t emotionally available, and when I sought connection, I was met with walls. She didn’t know how to nurture me because we had never built that trust. I wasn’t familiar, and she wasn’t safe.

Womanhood, for me, began in solitude. When I moved to college, I rented my own place at nineteen. That home became the first place I nurtured myself. I taught myself hygiene. I researched skincare. I experimented with clothes. I figured out how to manage menstrual cycles, hormones, and emotional swings. I learned through trial and error how to be a woman in the world. How to be me. Because there was no maternal guidance to rely on.

My mother valued grades, not growth. When I succeeded, she claimed it. When I struggled, I was met with shame. There was no softness, only expectations. Meanwhile, my eldest sister received everything I didn’t: attention, affection, nurturing. She was pampered. I was pressured. It wasn’t envy. It was erasure.

But even then, I never gave up on myself. That quiet fight, the one where I kept showing up for myself, is what shaped me into the woman I am today. I navigated womanhood like a language no one taught me, yet I spoke it fluently. Slowly, I made rituals of care. I embraced femininity in my own way. I allowed myself to want softness and stability, even when I’d never known them.

Self-worth wasn’t natural. It was built. Every time I looked in the mirror and chose kindness over criticism, I grew stronger. Every bath, every slow morning with my coffee, every skincare routine, every clean space I built, these became small love letters to the girl inside me who never got mothered. I became her mother. I gave her what she never received.

There’s a saying that echoes through generations: “One day your children will grow up and understand your actions.” It’s often said with the hope that when children mature, they’ll come to see the hardships, sacrifices, or unspoken love behind a parent’s choices. But understanding doesn’t always lead to sympathy. Sometimes, it leads to pain.

When I grew up, I did begin to understand. I understood that my mother wasn’t just busy, she chose distance over presence. I understood that favoritism wasn’t an accident, it was a pattern. I understood that being pushed hard wasn’t ambition, it was conditional love. And that realization stung. Because I didn’t just inherit independence, I inherited the burden of raising myself emotionally, the ache of watching softness be reserved for someone else, the silent trauma of pretending it didn’t hurt.

Understanding my parents’ actions didn’t absolve them. It gave me perspective, but it also forced me to confront what I didn’t get: the warmth, the guidance, the gentleness every child deserves. That understanding became a mirror I couldn’t unsee. And with it, came the hardest part of healing, reparenting myself while grieving a childhood that I never truly got to live.

Now, I live in a home I created. A house filled with furniture I chose with care, every corner softened with my touch. I spend quiet mornings brewing artisan coffee with our Breville machine. I cook with my husband in our kitchen, talk about our dreams, and laugh over dinner. We’ve built a peaceful life where I am loved without conditions. A home where womanhood is no longer about survival, but about joy, comfort, and returning to myself fully. It is a life with no limits. A life I mothered into existence.

Once I became peaceful, I felt more feminine: soft, intuitive, grounded and deeply in touch with my soul. That gentleness made my journey in finding God easier. And when love came again, I was able to receive it without resistance. Peace did not make me passive; it made me powerful. It made me finally feel like the woman I always knew I could become.

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Your favorite misunderstood masterpiece,
Madam Alias Solis
Writer, The Modern Heiress