I knew I had to finally cut ties with my mother the morning she called my 7-year-old son a monster.
It happened a year and a half ago. My mom had lived with me on and off for the last decade. When she lived with me, she helped get my kids ready for school in the morning so I could leave early for work. On the way to the bus that day, my son asked Mom for an extra granola bar, and she snapped. She loomed over him as he backed up against the wall, calling him names, then bursting into sobs. “Nobody cares what I want,” she’d said. “Nobody cares about me.”
That evening, my son told me, “She stayed mad even though I hugged her. She told me I don’t know how to love her, but I promise, I do.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d flirted with estrangement. For years, Mom and I had periods of disconnection when my facial expression, my tone of voice, or the attention I gave to my younger brother, dad, or friends caused Mom to believe that I didn’t truly love her and was “cold and cruel to the very core.” Whether I was a child or adult, when my mother’s emotions unexpectedly erupted, I often went stoic or tried to quietly problem-solve while Mom darted around the room, throwing objects or shrieking to try to get me to react. I took deep breaths and thought of the therapy words I’d learned: Her feelings are not my fault. This is the hurt little kid inside her acting up. If I don’t know what to do, I will do nothing.
“Say something! Do something!” she yelped, but whether I was 9, 12, 15, or 22, whatever I said or did seemed to confirm her belief that I wasn’t able to love her the way she deserved. “Why can’t we be like those TV mothers and daughters who always come back together at the end of the story?” I remember her asking once.
I’d tell her I loved her. Hug her. Hold her hands and rub her shoulders and feet. “You’re only doing this because I told you to. Your heart’s nowhere in sight,” she’d say.
I believed I was helping her by suppressing my emotions and allowing her to express herself. I believed this because, with the best intentions, my father taught me that collapsing was a way to stay safe and show care.
My father worked late hosting informational dinners about the fire alarms he sold to families across the Deep South. Many of the problems with my mother happened in the middle of the night when she’d come into my bedroom, frantic, waking me up to recount the subtle facial expressions or imperfect tones throughout the day that led her to believe I didn’t know how to love her.
When my father came home to find Mom pacing back and forth in the kitchen while I sat on the counter cross-legged, trying to reason with her, he would go into fix-it mode. He spoke softly, touching my mother’s hair and walking her into their bedroom. After she’d calmed down, he talked me through it. He told me that when people are mean, it’s usually because they’re scared or hurting. He said that sometimes my mom was too afraid or wounded to take care of herself, and that’s where I came in. He pointed out that I was so damn good at staying even-keeled, it was like a superpower that I could use to protect myself from whatever Mom did or said. He taught me de-escalation techniques like keeping a gentle voice and a half-smile, like relying on catchphrases like, “I’m here. I’m listening to you.”
He said he learned these strategies from dealing with scary people during his time smuggling and selling drugs before I was born. My guess is that he actually started learning them when he was a little kid, just as I did, when his own mother suffered mightily from severe, untreated depression, compounded by a lifetime of generational poverty and the early deaths of many of her family members. Back then, my dad didn’t know anything about codependency. The word fawning didn’t become part of our cultural lexicon until he’d been dead for more than a decade. He didn’t have access to the DSM online or social-media trends about emotional abuse, neurodivergence, or personality disorders. He grew up in a converted mobile home in rural Florida, escaped the South as a hitchhiking hippie, and eventually fell in with a flourishing underground-drug industry.
Then he met my mom. When he found out she was pregnant, my father left his criminal life behind to build and protect his family. He regretted the pain and addiction he felt he caused. His singular goals were keeping us alive and teaching us to find as much joy in the difficult moments as possible.
He didn’t understand that he was teaching me to survive by abandoning myself for the sake of rescuing others, that when I “stayed even” during Mom’s frenzies, I was really just going numb.
My brother, Ryan, is two years younger than me. When we were in our 20s, I told him about Mom’s middle-of-the night antics, as he’d slept through most of it during our childhood. “Why did she do that to you and not me?” he asked.
I guessed it was because Mom saw Ryan as more affectionate. “Ryan’s sweet like me, and you’re cold like your dad,” she’d say.
When Ryan and I were in our 30s, we learned that we’re both neurodivergent. My autism and ADHD presented as being sensory averse, quietly processing, afraid to say or do the wrong thing in touchy interpersonal situations before I fully understood them. “Emotionally reactive people often feel disconnected when their loved ones don’t clap back,” my therapist later told me. “When your mom’s lid was flipped, she could only relate to someone else if they flipped their lid, too. The fiercer her explosion, the more you shrunk yourself. She took that shrinking as hiding.”
“So if I had gotten angry, she’d have believed that I love her?” I asked.
“That’s my guess,” he said. “Probably she grew up seeing anger as an expression of love.”
Of course, our family’s story wasn’t a litany of terrors. We grew up chewing on wild sugarcane, swimming with manatees, and watching dolphins play in the Gulf of Mexico. Mom was an amateur photographer, and she often snapped random pictures of Ryan and me with her kitchen Polaroid or tiny disposable cameras stored all over the house. In them, we laugh with our heads thrown back or smile wide, holding crafts we made with our mom. On the weekends, we snuck into the Holiday Inn on the beach to use the pool and ping-pong tables. When we could afford it, we stayed at cabins on the Gulf Coast netting crabs or occasionally went to Disney World.
The tough nights with my mom were easy enough to ignore scattered through our quaint but often cheerful family life. The mornings after, I’d get up early, plug in the coffee pot, and make breakfast for Ryan. When Mom woke up, we warmed up to each other quickly: I gave her a hug; she made goofy jokes and told me how beautiful she thought my hair or outfit was that day.
For years and years, I believed I had a pretty great childhood.
I was 8 the first time I remember Mom calling me a sociopath. I gripped Ryan’s hand in the back seat of our rusted sedan while Dad sped to the hospital two days into our family vacation, Mom slumped in the seat beside him. Between dry heaves and low moans, she told me to stop whimpering. “First you break my neck, then you try to steal all the attention. That’s what sociopaths do.”
Earlier that day, my brother and I sat on our parents’ shoulders while they waded in our motel pool: he on Dad’s, me on Mom’s. Without warning, they grabbed our ankles at the same time and flipped us backward into the icy water. As I fell, my arms shot forward, grabbing Mom’s neck and jerking it back, my reflexive attempt to save myself. By the time I came up for air, my mother was already on her hands and knees on the side of the pool, wailing and holding her neck with both hands like if she let go, her head might fall off.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I kept saying it for weeks. The emergency-room doctors, a specialist, and two surgeons gave Mom the same diagnosis: whiplash, not a broken neck.
In the motel room, I refilled plastic grocery bags with ice from the machine to press against her neck. She took two Lortabs and rested, barely moving. “I had children so someone would always love me,” she said. “You try so hard, but your heart’s not there.” She gulped and cried, and I held ice on her neck and hugged her. I remember taking a breath before each hug. I didn’t really want to hold her. Her body was so much bigger than mine, and it was awkward when she buried her face against my chest. I stroked her hair like Dad did when he was trying to soothe her. I wanted to undo the damage I’d caused, though I couldn’t understand how my reaction in the pool meant I didn’t love her. After the accident, I believed that taking care of Mom was the only way to make us both feel safe, like a real family. I wasn’t sure if I even deserved to be a part of that family anymore. I’d known for a long time about my missing heart. I’d already vowed to spend my life learning how to find it.
For the three decades that followed, I supported my mom through her mental unwellness and various addictions. When I was 13, she bruised herself and called the police to get a restraining order out on my father. When Dad subsequently moved out, Ryan followed him immediately. I stayed with Mom for six months until, after weeks of night wake-ups, I walked out the front door, walked the mile to my high school, and kept walking along the low-slung, sweltering North Florida landscape, across the three-mile bay bridge, past squat palm trees and surf shops and strip clubs, to my father’s house. I walked inside and curled on the couch and slept without saying anything. When I woke up, Dad brought me a bowl of venison chili and sat beside me on the couch, cracking pecans from the backyard tree. “Is your mom waking you up again every night?” he asked. I nodded.
“I shouldn’t have left you behind to carry all that,” he said. Not long after, she brought my brother with her when she attempted to clip the brake lines of my dad’s motorcycle during their divorce.
When Ryan and I lived with Dad, we still talked to Mom here and there, but I refused to visit. I could relax at my father’s house, lean into being an obnoxious, pain-in-the-ass teenager, horse-laughing at my friends’ gossip on AOL Instant Messenger and sleeping through every night with no fear of waking to another person’s emotional emergency. Mom’s house had become a haunted place, a hungry creature instead of an old home. When she organized a “breakfast date” one Saturday morning, I asked Ryan and Dad to decline. I had a feeling that Mom was up to something. I hid at a friend’s house but stayed on the phone with Dad while he pulled into Mom’s driveway and watched Ryan with his blond bowl cut and tall Adidas socks bound into the house. Dad waited on the phone with me until Ryan came out to give him a thumbs-up, but instead, Ryan stuck his head out of my old bedroom window howling for Dad to help. Dad rushed inside, breaking through the threshold of the phony but totally legal restraining order. He found Mom cocooned in my former comforter, her lips blue, surrounded by bottles and booze. He told Ryan to call 911 while he resuscitated her.
Throughout it all, I’d never cut off contact with my mother, and I still didn’t when she reported that restraining-order violation, resulting in my father’s arrest. I didn’t after his four days in jail — before the charges were dismissed — which made him miss a needed liver treatment for his hepatitis C. I didn’t when the liver disease eventually corrupted Dad’s esophagus, causing it to rupture when I was 15.
After he died, Ryan and I sequestered at a family friend’s house, but Mom threatened to sue for the Social Security money she’d receive from regaining custody of me and Ryan after Dad died. When she came to retrieve us, we stood together under a blazing morning sun. She offered me her and dad’s old bedroom, a huge converted garage with a muted pink carpet and a door to the front driveway. “You’re the only one with a job, anyway,” she said. “You deserve to sleep in a place you can always escape.”
For a year, I tried to make the best of living with her, to love her even though I was afraid of the drama and even though she blew through money. I worked at the McDonald’s drive-through and a coffee shop across the street from my high school to pay the bills. I brought home old burgers and stale muffins for dinner. When Mom wasn’t at a beach dive bar or sleeping off a bender, we watched action-movie reruns together, or I sat with her while her emotions churned, saying, “I’m here. I’m listening to you,” over and over.
Then my mother received a felony conviction for assaulting a boyfriend with a rusted wrench. She was required to go to anger-management counseling and started medication. It seemed to help, so I moved out, hoping that the friendly relationship my mother had always maintained with my brother would stay. Months after I left, Ryan showed up at my new house across town, sweating after running five miles. “Mom’s been raising hell in the middle of the night,” he said.
Within a few weeks, I arranged for my brother to move to Tennessee to finish out high school with our uncle. “You’ve taken away the only person who ever really loved me,” my mother told me at one point.
Mom and I rarely saw each other, but we were civil and checked in over the phone. Once every couple of months, she’d call me seemingly drunk, guilty and apologizing. “I know I hurt you, and I don’t know why,” she said. “I can see now that you’re always trying so hard to prove that you love me. You shouldn’t have to try so hard.”
Mom brought me to my first therapist after Dad died, convinced I was bottling grief that would keep me from ever transforming into the affectionate TV daughter she hoped I’d become. When the therapist sent me home with breathing exercises and diagnosed Mom with a personality disorder, she vowed we’d never return, calling him a “sexist pig.” But I was hooked. I wanted to understand her.
After I moved out, every time I saw a flyer for a burst of free therapy at a neighborhood clinic or had access to a college counselor, I went. “My mom believed I was a sociopath,” I told therapist after therapist. “I still send her money. I try to take care of her, but she’s convinced. I don’t think she’s right, but what if she’s right?” Therapists asked me if anyone else in my life believed I was a sociopath, and I admitted that the negative feedback I’d gotten had to do with overextending myself or being distracted. One therapist said, “Is it possible that the problem is actually the worry you have about not loving people right?”
In college, I took women’s studies classes, trying to understand my mother’s unpredictable slams between fury and despair, afraid seeds of her dysregulation were buried in me. I read every book I could find on psychology and mothers and women, hoping there was an answer inside of feminist philosophy, a hidden treasure that could explain why Mom needed so much from me, and that despite my efforts, I never seemed to get it right. I wanted to legitimize our experience, to make it reasonable, understandable. I wanted to believe she wasn’t a bad mom, just a different kind of mom than we’re all used to.
At the time, I thought I was searching for information to solve a problem. Now I know that my hunt was more about controlling the situation. I read furiously, reframing and reframing, believing that with the right tools, I could mold my mom into a neutral, safe person.
While nothing I read helped me make sense of my mother’s existential minefields, the more I learned, the more I wanted to offer support — not blame. I sent Mom books and articles that I thought would help her. In the meantime, Mom surfed couches and boyfriends, her periods of stable housing always punctuated by a country-music song exit: Mom would lose her job and get evicted or have her car repossessed then accuse her friends and lovers of abuse after they refused to carry her weight.
Because we only communicated over the phone, it seemed like we were growing something like friendship, a semblance of mutual respect, and by the time my first child was born in my early 20s, I vowed to take a generous perspective.
When he was born, like so many new parents, I was both in awe of my baby and struggling to adapt to the persistent demands on my body that come with raising and breastfeeding a newborn. I worked full-time as a nanny and freelance journalist, bringing my infant with me while my then-husband was deployed on Navy ships. Like me, my mom had been raising kids partly alone. Maybe, she, like me, had done her best with the tools she had.
I stopped trying to figure her out and decided to believe she had been good enough, and since I was the one with access to higher education, I figured it was my responsibility to help her find treatment. By then, Mom had remarried, and although my stepfather and I differed in almost all of our interests and beliefs, he seemed to truly care for my mother. With his support and good insurance, Mom found a psychiatrist and medications that she said helped keep her more calm and present.
For nearly ten years, my mother and I lived separated by at least five states. Our relationship was often stable, though she frequently asked for money or a place to stay when she felt her new husband wasn’t attending to her in the way she deserved. When I said no — twice — she’d contact our family and post on social media, outlining the ways I had abandoned her in her time of need.
Through therapy, I learned that I was terrible at setting boundaries. My therapist tasked me with defining a threshold of behaviors that were unacceptable, to tell my mother that if she didn’t stop, I would break contact with her. In both circumstances, I broke contact entirely for a year or so until, phone call by phone call, we rebuilt our relationship much as we had after my father died.
During my divorce in my early 30s, Mom decided to leave her husband, too. She had been in consistent therapy and stable for a couple years. She offered to help me raise my three young children. “I’ve always wanted to be a grandma,” she said. “I know I made such terrible mistakes when you were little. I’d do anything for a second chance.” She agreed to hard boundaries around conflict resolution. My longtime therapist supported the idea, so Mom moved across the country and into a spare bedroom in my home. For three years, she got my kids ready for school, picked them up when they were sick, and babysat so I could grow my social life. We went on getaways and to girls’ fondue night, and we visited spas together. We didn’t argue, though occasionally Mom would ask me to sit with her and listen while she outlined the same cascade of worries she’d always shared: that I loved everyone else more than her, that there was something frozen inside of me. I reassured her. I made her a warm drink and brought her to bed, like my father had done. I told myself that because she voiced her concerns quietly and without much drama, this was a totally acceptable situation. I told myself I wasn’t parenting her anymore. At the time, I still didn’t define our history as abusive. When people asked about my mother, I said we had strong but opposite personalities. I said we were both complicated.
Toward the end of my divorce, my own body had started to wake me up in the middle of the night, suddenly frantic for no apparent reason. During these events, I could barely breathe, my heartbeat slamming, my back sweating. I thought I had a heart problem, but months of testing revealed my actual diagnosis: nocturnal panic attacks. Eventually, a few years into my mother living with us, my therapist suggested that this sudden onset panic-attack disorder may have roots in my mother’s late-night meltdowns when I was a kid. “It’s as if you’ve spent your whole life in a state of emergency, and now that you have good boundaries and can actually relax, your brain sends you into panic when you do.” I recoiled at the idea that I was a victim. I believed that I was fully responsible for how my history impacted my present. My personality and capacity to add value to my life were my own. “What happens if you’re not responsible?” he asked me. “What does your life look like if your choices never determine someone else’s behavior?”
When the pandemic began, Mom lived a ten-minute drive from my house, but we stopped seeing each other to protect her from catching COVID. She also quit therapy. One morning, out of nowhere, I woke up to dozens of texts in all caps, rehashing everything she’d said to me on those long nights when I was a kid. I immediately went no contact. Ryan moved to live closer to both of us a year later. After two years of no contact, back on track with mental-health care but living in terrible conditions, she asked Ryan to deliver a letter that read like a more nuanced repeat of her previous heartfelt apologies.
At that point, I’d been a single, working parent for eight years, and the pandemic had been a slog for me, too. “We’ve got to get her out of that meth house,” Ryan said. Mom and I had a long conversation about what living together would look like this time. I met with my therapist, and he again supported the idea of cohabitation but with more draconian boundaries. I told Mom that if she stopped therapy or behaved with hostility or aggression toward me, she’d have to move out. She nodded and looked in my eyes, accepting my terms. For a couple months, we once again played house together. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she attacked my son.
When I confronted her about her outburst, she jutted out her chin and howled, “You always care more about everyone else.” She’s jealous of my son, I realized. Compassion threatened to overwhelm my anger; I thought, It must feel so lonely to believe nobody can ever love you the way you need to be loved.
“That kid has everything he needs,” she said, nodding toward my son’s bedroom. “What about me?”
I felt a new resolve then: Her profound loneliness was her responsibility, not mine, and certainly not my son’s. My children — not my mother — deserved my unconditional love, my patience, and my time. She had received enough parenting from me. I couldn’t guide her through whatever shadow was currently rising through her. She had to leave.
After she calmed down, we planned a slow, mindful move-out to reduce disruption for the kids. She acted understanding and amenable, but a month later, she packed up and left without notice while we were away on a trip. I came home to find aggressive notes folded into crevices in the furniture; in her trashed bedroom there was a painting on the wall that she’d created with a collision of phrases like, “She believed she could, so she did” and “She was worthy.”
Within weeks of her exit, Mom texted fervent apologies again, but it didn’t matter. Something inside me had shifted. I realized that as much as my mother had been trying to turn me into a sitcom daughter, I’d never fully accepted her, either. Part of me longed for her to parent me the way she parented my brother. I had to accept that, for whatever reason, she could not be in a relationship with me without wanting me to take care of her. I couldn’t tolerate the idea of my mother competing with my children for my care or parentifying them someday. I wasn’t angry or hurt. I was simply and joyfully finished.
I sent my mother a final text, explaining why this time was not a break but a permanent estrangement. I blocked her number. Nobody in the family questioned my choice. Instead, they responded with relief. “When you were born, she targeted you, and she seems to be addicted to it,” my cousin said. “I don’t think she can be healthy around you. She’ll always want more. Maybe the best way to take care of her is to cut off the supply.”
Once cut off from contact, I felt the slow release of long-held stress. My panic attacks had faded through therapy, but Mom’s departure sped up the process. Within months, I noticed that I felt more relaxed and focused. I admitted to my therapist that this period, like the previous breaks from Mom, made me feel weirdly playful. “Of course you’ve got more to give,” my therapist told me. “You had to guard your tenderness around your mom because she punished you so hard for not measuring up to her impossible expectations. Ironically, she made you a kind of ‘sociopath’ — just for her.”
My experiences with my mom were challenging, but they moved me to stick with therapy for years. I learned to communicate and process my emotions in healthy ways, to own my mistakes, to navigate conflict without hurting others — and to model this for my family.
After my mom left, I worked with therapists to explain the situation to my children. I watched them process the disruption, talking about the size of their feelings, drawing pictures of the events, and meeting with school counselors. “They have great thinking around this,” the counselors said, and I felt a beam of gratitude for the life I came from and the mother I’m learning to be. I do not think harmful events always bring us to redemption or resilience, but part of accepting my mother for who she is was taking a good look at who I actually am, too: a mash-up of the qualities I liked in my father and the movie parents I grew up watching. I’m a sometimes overworked, annoyingly self-reflective, goofy, and engaged mom. I’m sure my kids will have so many complaints, but if they grow up feeling like they own themselves, like they understand interdependence and the value of self-advocacy and choice, I will feel like I did all right.
When I ask them if they miss their Mimi, they all say the same thing: “I don’t miss her, but I love her.”
“Do you want to talk to her?” I ask.
“Not yet,” they say, and I’ll keep asking and respecting their decisions. I’m not sure if keeping them cut off from their grandmother is the right move, but I’m sure it is the safest because it is what they want.
My mother claimed she had children so someone would always love her, but I believe it’s a parent’s duty to do the opposite. I want my kids to know they are always loved, to offer them the family my dad showed me before he died: a peaceful life where awe is always available if you look hard enough. That’s the texture of care I hope to provide, steady and abundant, even when life is brutal, where attending to others’ needs is an option, perhaps an opportunity for connection, but never a requirement. A life in which they can believe without trying that they are as real as the people they love.
More From This Series
- The Crisis That Gave Me My Brother Back
- To Care for My Family, I Thought I Had to Hide My Abuse
- How to Financially Plan for Taking Care of Your Parents