Letters to Mom

In 2020, I lost my mom.

She didn’t die, or anything like that. She just stopped being my mom. She stopped being a woman I could trust. I started to see her abusive for what it was. I lost my connection with her.

It’s not the first time I’ve told the story and it won’t be the last. I had been in the hospital for my Crohn’s disease, was unable to work. My rent was due that week, but since I hadn’t been able to work, I was short $65 on something like $300 rent. She threw me out that day. Since then, we haven’t been able to get to a point where things are the same. Frankly, I’m not sure I want to.

Things were rough with my mom going into that scene. Earlier in the year, I went into an in-patient psychiatric facility due to suicidal ideation. A lot of that was spurned on by feeling like I would never be good enough. I was failing my classes, I couldn’t get up in the morning, I was depressed and anxious, I couldn’t find the energy to hang out with my friends, let alone do my laundry or clean my room. All that on top of being in and out of the hospital almost constantly for my Crohn’s disease and then an enlarged ovary.

Instead of the support I desperately needed, I got a lot of ablelism, a lot of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” a lot of “just do it” and “I’m mentally ill too, so why can’t you…”

I felt like all I could ever be to her was a failure. It was then that I really started to see the pattern of her lack of support for me. It happened in high school. It happened the first time I went to college, and again the second time. It happened anytime I wasn’t working or doing something she deemed productive. I was learning that her love was conditional.

When I went in-patient, I learned for certain that her love was conditional. She didn’t want to come in for the family session, let alone even talk to me on the phone, because she was “afraid of being blamed.” My then-best-friend-now-wife took me to and from the hospital, got me clothes while I was there, and did the family session with me and my therapist.

While I was there, I did a lot of reflection. I mean, there really isn’t much else to do. I wrote a lot. I wrote letters upon letters to my mom. Some heartbroken. Some angry. Some trying to understand where she was coming from. Some trying to convince her of my side, my story, and my hurt. Some asking for apologies. Some giving apologies. None of them ever made it to her. During that time, I realized she wasn’t going to be there for me when it counted. She later proved that to me when she threw me out.

Of course, we talked when I got home. Not on her schedule, because I wanted to go out after being stuck inside for five days. But we did eventually talk. More like, she denied any accountability while I poured my heart out to her and my dad, and had to scream at her to listen to me for once. My dad cried. My mom was just angry she was being blamed for anything and refused to acknowledge my hurt, stating “If it’s that bad, why don’t you just leave?” as if I had the resources to do so.

Between the time I got back from in-patient to the time I was thrown out, I uncovered a lot for myself. The way she was emotionally manipulative toward me; the way we only ever talked about her and her problems; the way that if I “kept” something - a partner, a job offer, a bad grade - that I was keeping secrets and so hurtful, but if she did the same, she was a private person; the way she used money to keep me in line - whether by threatening to throw me out, up my rent, rescind financial help for school, or the other direction - buying me nice things to keep me happy and satisfied; the way I always walked on eggshells around her, never knowing if her bad day would get taken out on me somehow; the way I came home from friends with anxiety, wondering if she had found some little thing to be angry about that day. It was all beginning to culminate for me. I was starting to see the light, and see her for what she truly was - an abusive narcissist.

When she finally did it - and I say finally, because it really felt like a long time coming at that point - it still hurt. Sure, I packed up my stuff quickly, got my friends to help me get the most important things - but when I was done and saying my goodbyes, and she went in for the hug (that she didn’t get), it still broke me. I got halfway to my aunt’s house, where I would be staying, before breaking down in tears.

You see, this whole time, my mother had acted like she was my best friend. When things were good, they were really, really good. We had a good time talking to each other, laughing and having fun. We had a routine, we were partners. Or so I had thought. But as I started to grow more independent, go out with friends more, spend my money more freely, she had turned on me and used that against me. Maybe she had been lonely. I don’t know, I’m not here to make excuses for her. Point is, it felt like I was losing my best friend in the entire world.

Now I’m here, still processing this mess almost seven months later. The holidays were really hard, because it was my first away from my family, and it wasn’t by choice. I didn’t have my regular traditions. I didn’t get to watch White Christmas with my mom. We didn’t make Christmas cookies. I didn’t get to set up her nativity. It feels like a lot to lose.

Hence why, I’m really struggling with the thought of going no contact, of never talking to her again. She’s moving in February. We’re just outside of Chicago, and she’s moving down to Nashville. If we don’t talk before then, we likely never will again. I hate the thought of my mom kicking the can and never having made up with her. But I don’t know if what I’m doing is just holding onto something that will never be, or if there is actually hope.

My brother still lives with her, and says she seems to be going through it, too, but that she doesn’t want to accept accountability for anything. Not in this thing with me, not with any disagreements she has with him, not with any she has with my father. He seems to think she’s on a pathway to change.

I guess I don’t see that for her. I certainly hope it for her, but I don’t see it. I see a woman too set in her ways, too invested in her own rightness to ever be wrong, to ever apologize, to ever be held accountable.

Despite all this, despite feeling like she will never change, I have this urge to make things right. The worst part about this urge is that I can’t suss out whether or not this is a product of her abuse and my trauma, or if it’s a genuine want of mine.

I know I’m definitely hanging on, in some way, to what I thought our relationship was. What I’d hoped it would be or could be. What I dream of having. I thought I had the perfect mother/daughter, then, mother/son relationship. I thought we were best friends. I thought we were like the movies. I’ve been sorting out, these past seven months, that what I thought was wrong. I don’t have a relationship with my mom like that. What I thought was a Gilmore Girls situation turned out to be more like Lifetime television.

I’m mourning that. I’m mourning that loss. I didn’t physically lose my mom. She’s still alive and kicking, God help anyone that runs into her, but I did lose her. I lost what I thought and hoped we could have. I lost dinner and conversations about work, I lost grocery trips together, I lost cooking together, I lost Christmas, I lost Thanksgiving, I lost her side of the family, I lost any chance of her coming to my wedding and getting to dance with her, I lost bonding over shitty Hallmark movies. I’m never going to get to have that again, and yes, that is entirely my decision in going no contact with her, but it’s still hard and it still hurts.

I think that’s why I’m having such trouble with this decision. I know people who have lost their moms for real, who don’t have one. I feel guilty for having a mom that is alive, but deciding not to have a relationship with her for my mental health, of all things. I feel like it’s such a silly reason, even though I know that’s the ableism talking. I see cousins and friends still interacting with their moms who do the same things mine does and think… Am I just not strong enough? Am I weak for choosing my mental health over a relationship with her? Am I holding a grudge? Am I toxic?

I know sometimes, I write these articles… pieces of my life, whatever you want to call them - like I have all the answers. This time I don’t feel like I do. I don’t know what the answer is, I just have all of these feelings and no one to talk to them about extensively because for some reason therapy through the clinic I go to is only a thirty minute session (I mean, really? That’s not enough time, but that’s a different post). My wife is a very forceful proponent of no contact and isn’t really the neutral sounding board I need. I suppose part of it is me not wanting to burden anyone else with the heaviness of the feelings.

I’m okay with not having an answer right now. I’m okay with not having advice or solutions. I’m okay with people keeping their two cents. I’m okay with sitting with these feelings. I think I need to. I think I just needed to get them out. I needed to say - or write - them in order for them to feel fully realized and validated.

I think I will come to a point where I will have an answer. I think that point will come later in my recovery, after I’ve learned more about narcissistic behaviors and cycles of abuse. I think answers will come after research… and maybe some experimentation. I may be out of the immediate situation, but I’m not done with this journey yet. There’s still a lot to learn and grow from. That I do know.

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