meaning of "tap into it" [closed]

Question

https://vivfortoday.com/relationships/dear-mom/

(I wish you weren’t a stranger.

Mark remembers you. He was eight when you passed away. Sometimes I envy the fact that he has his memory to go on. Other times, though, I think I got off lucky. Especially when it comes to Mimi. She married dad a couple of years after you passed. The poor thing went from zero kids to two kids over the course of a registry office wedding and a few finger sandwiches. I was young and I welcomed her with open arms. Despite becoming motherless when you passed, I have never felt motherless, and I’m thankful for that.)

"They say you left a gap.

Over the years, therapists tried to get me talking about the massive gap you’d left in my life, but I couldn’t tap into it. For a while, I didn’t believe them. I truly thought they were looking for something that simply wasn’t there. Then I had Anna."

(As I reflected on the bond she and I shared by the time she was three years old, I thought about you a lot. About the bond you and I must have shared and about the gap you must have left, even though I could never quite put my finger on it. Mostly, though, I thought about how hard it must have been for you to know that you were going to leave me. Leave us.)

Question: (1) What does "tap into" here mean? "connect herself to the gap they said her deceased mom had left"?

(2) Why couldn't she tap into it? Because she didn't even remember her? Let alone feel what they meant by the gap she must have left?

Answer 1

The word "tap" is a term sometimes used for putting a spigot, or tap, into something to extract what is inside. A classic case is "tapping" maple syrup. What he is saying is that he can't draw upon those experiences, much like someone who can't get the tap set into the maple tree (I've heard it's definitely an art) to pull out the sweet sap.

As for why she couldn't tap into that scenario to produce relief of her grief over her loss, I suspect that it is, as she says, because she didn't recognize the loss. Until she became a mother herself, she didn't realize what she was missing, so there was nothing for her to talk about with her therapist.

Answer 2

1. In this context it means get access to the gap (the narrator is speaking metaphorically, and in a literal sense, tapping would mean pulling liquid out of something, e.g., tapping a tree to get sap or tapping a keg to get beer).

2. It’s probably a combination of all of these, the narrator’s experience of her mother is primarily one of absence. At 3½, she likely has no real memories of her mother and knows her only through what others have told her about her mother. Tapping into the gap that was left is a challenge because (a) it’s a gap and (2) it’s all she has of her mother, unlike her father’s experience where they were married for some years before her death and so her absence has some context.