We’re taught—implicitly and explicitly—that motherhood is synonymous with unconditional affection, that proximity guarantees care, and that a mother’s investment in her daughter is natural, inevitable, and mutual. When that bond fractures, the daughter is almost always taught to interpret the rupture as personal failure rather than relational reality. She’s told to be more patient, more understanding, more forgiving. But what’s rarely examined is the possibility that the mother, burdened by her own unresolved wounds, projections, and arrested becoming, experiences her daughter not as an extension of love but as a mirror she can’t bear to face.