The Day I Broke Up with My Mother
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
I’ve always had a fraught relationship with my mother. I’ve known for years that my foundational issues of anxiety and severe insomnia stem, in large part, from having to be hypervigilant—on edge and on eggshells at all times—in the household of my youth. My mother’s emotional volatility and swiftness to anger, like a blunt, unexpected sucker punch, for any number of perceived infractions created a chronic feeling of unease and unsafety. That feeling has continued to linger and hover over all our interactions, even though she lives a long plane ride away.
When the pandemic hit and my anxiety reached an all-time high—and I often went several days without a wink of sleep, as my old coping mechanisms of dissociation and escapist fantasies deserted me—I could no longer handle the delicate balance, the tightrope, I had to walk to sidestep potential arguments and her perpetually hurt feelings.
We’d had a series of confrontations around my failed attempts to support her feelings sufficiently and my refusal to get ensnared in her drama. My therapist had coached me on using sympathetic but distancing language, like “I hear how painful that is for you” or “I see how difficult that experience was for you,” to help her feel seen and heard without escalating her charged feelings or getting too involved. I knew it was a fruitless strategy, but I tried it. Our final row in a series of three went like this:
Mom: Your wife never comes to the phone when I call.
Me: She’s always preoccupied with our daughter—she’s only 3.
Mom: When I was young, I always got on the phone to speak my mother-in-law, and I had two smalls kids.
Me: I hear you.
Mom: Do you think I wanted to get on the phone with my mother-in-law?
Me: Probably not. I hear you.
Mom: But why doesn’t she come to the phone?
Me: I don’t know, Mom. It’s always frenetic over here.
Mom: You kids always have an excuse. Life’s just so hard for you. We did far more with far less when we were young.
Me: Why are you looking for a fight?
Mom: I’m not looking for a fight, goddamn it!
I could have refrained from asking why she was looking for a fight, but the line of questioning would not stop; it would go on and on with soul-crushing persistence until she could provoke my ire and entangle me in an altercation. That’s how it always went.
But I just couldn’t do it anymore: I was too unwell.
I felt like something larger than me—call it divinity or just a complete mental breakdown—compelled me to weigh something I never imagined before: breaking up with my mother.
It hit me with a certainty as sure as my heartbeat that in order to patch up my ever-tattering mental health, I needed to stop communicating with her, my formative emotional trigger. While I knew unequivocally that it was a healthy and necessary step toward healing, it felt impossible.
Each time I inched toward the dreaded conversation via text or telephone, I faltered and couldn’t get the words out.
“Mom, I know you won’t understand, but I need to take a break from our relationship.” Delete, delete, delete.
“Mom, I love you very much, but in order to improve our relationship, I need to take space from you for a while.” Delete. Delete. Delete.
“Mom, you are an emotional terrorist and I never want to speak to you again.” Delete. Delete. Delete.
Just thinking the thought and writing the texts felt taboo. What kind of person forsakes their own mother, the woman who gave them life and nurtured their development?
Everywhere I turned, from popular culture to friends, the notion was outright condemned. On Showtime’s drama series The Affair, Whitney Solloway (Julia Goldani Telles) screams that her grandmother Margaret Butler (Kathleen Chalfant) is a “fucking monster,” to which Whitney’s mother, Helen (Maura Tierney), promptly replies, “Yes, but she’s our monster!” (Subtext: Your mother can emotionally abuse you, and you have to endure it because she’s “yours.”)
Reflecting a similar sentiment, a close friend waved away my wish to excise my mother from my life: “Aw, come on, she’s your mother! Make amends!” A guy friend added, more cuttingly, “I could never do that to my mother, even if I wanted to.” (Code: You are a piece of garbage if you dump your mom.) The details, even ugly ones, didn’t matter; their bedrock belief was that renouncing one’s mother—even if she rivals Mommy Dearest—is not acceptable, no matter what.
The reason abandoning one’s mother, symbolically and often literally the nucleus of the family, feels particularly threatening is because the nuclear family is the principal way we’ve organized society, and it bears the heavy load of all our needs, according to Orna Guralnik, PsyD, the psychologist, psychoanalyst, and therapist on Showtime’s Couples Therapy. “Everything, everything hinges on the nuclear family. All the weight falls on it. There’s no welfare system, especially in America, so the whole burden of support falls on the family,” she explains.
Friends might balk at the thought of deserting one’s home base because it’s the one thing holding our fragile stability—and security—in place, however tenuously. “Breaking that kind of tie is threatening to one’s very structure. It’s a big leap, a big risky bungee jump,” Guralnik says.
It’s not only sociologically foundational; it’s psychologically foundational, too: “The maternal body is the world. It’s the first love object. It’s the first object of play. It’s the first object of hate. It’s the body, whether concretely or metaphorically, that supplies milk in life. It’s everything in the beginning. It’s what the child brings their first poop to, you know?” Guralnik jokes. That indignant “How could you?” response to my desire for a mom break likely felt imperiling to my friends’ own maternal attachments. It hits something too tender to touch.
In the chorus of disapproval, I hear the old adages my immigrant parents believed in unequivocally, and they weaken my resolve when I consider disconnecting: “You only have one mother,” “Family is family,” and “Blood is thicker than water.”
What makes it even harder is a statement my mother frequently and fondly declares when she’s flummoxed by my and my brother’s resentments: “I never molested or beat you kids.” On more morbid days, quoting a friend, she’ll add: “If I had murdered you when you were babies, I’d be out for good behavior. But I let you live, so I’m serving a life sentence.” She’s joking, of course (I think?), but the idea is that whatever complaints my brother and I have about her as a parent are unjust and illegitimate because she never inflicted bodily harm on us (aside from the occasionally pulled hair and smack).
Wounds that are internal, as opposed to external, are harder for both parents and children—and society in general—to recognize as abuse, according to Karyl McBride, PhD, the author of Will the Drama Ever End? and Will I Ever Be Good Enough? “If you’re 6 years old and your mother breaks your arm, everybody gets that it’s wrong, including the kid, but psychological and emotional abuse is harder to explain and for people to understand. It comes out in so many strange forms,” she explains.
McBride says kids who grow up under constant emotional duress often develop “complex post-traumatic stress disorder” from ongoing or “a series of traumas”—as opposed to one traumatic event—from which it is far more challenging to heal.
That resonates: There isn’t a single incident of abuse I can point to in my childhood but rather an enduring and all-pervasive feeling of unsafety and fear due to my mother’s unpredictability and explosive wrath. Navigating our home was like walking through a minefield. I have very vivid memories of anxiously sitting at the dinner table, afraid I might spill my milk or drop a piece of food on the floor and send her into all-engulfing rage.
McBride says sometimes taking a break, whether permanent or temporary, is essential to mending one’s mental health—in the care of a therapist, she emphasizes. One of the most successful ways to make that break, she offers, is a self-focused approach. “You might say, ‘I hope you can understand, but I have some things internally I’m working on for me. I’ll be in touch down the road when I can.’”
Somehow during the worst phase of my depression and anxiety, I was able to silence the loud cultural imperatives about how I should and should not behave vis-à-vis my mother and listen to my own needs, as my well-being continued to unravel: I asked her for space. To be honest, it wasn’t so much a choice as a visceral necessity, but I composed a gentle text:
“Mom, I love you very much, and I know you won’t understand, but I need to take a break from our relationship to heal myself and improve our relationship.”
A torrent of texts ensued, and I had to block her for a stretch. It’s now been two and a half years. I have continued to reach out with greeting cards or brief texts for special occasions—practicing what McBride calls “civil connect,” which is low and limited contact in a very controlled, boundary-driven way—for birthday and holidays, which are uniquely painful, as songs and movies about filial love and family festivities dominate the media.
I have bad days and good days, but over time, it’s gotten easier. I’ve slowly adapted to a healthier belief system—one in which I try to just let things be and bear witness to what is without judgment, as opposed to prostrating myself to the failed expectations and disappointments of “should” thinking (ie.“I should call my mother”; “My brother should be in therapy”; “My kid should be able to sit still and eat her food at the table”). When I’m successful at being a neutral spectator in my own life, it makes me feel lighter and less tense. Happy, even. I’ve let go of those old-school edicts that had long coerced me into a deeply unhealthy and self-destructive dynamic with my mother, and I’ve started a new life of sorts in which she, for now, is not present.
Without my nervous system on high alert for how I might misstep or disappoint her every day, I’ve learned to better regulate my own emotions, which has decreased my anxiety and increased my sleep. With less angst-ridden noise in my head, my mind is quieter, more serene, more joyful, which has helped me gain clarity on what I want my life—my parenting, my marriage, my friendships, and my career—to look like.
I still hope to reach a point where I can have a relationship with her without becoming unmoored by her tempests like a sequoia in a storm, but I’m not there yet.
You Might Also Like
