A letter to those who are estranged from their mums
Sending you love this (and every) Mother's Day.
Originally published on siennabarton.com in May 2022.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated Mother’s Day. When I was growing up, they’d always start sweetly with homemade cards and breakfast in bed – toast and microwaved tea because we weren’t allowed to use the kettle unsupervised. Throughout the day, as we fell short of our mum’s expectations, she’d get tenser and moodier as I scrambled at different ways of trying to reclaim her affection. I’m the eldest child and my sister’s two years younger than me, and also on the Autism spectrum, which (like most kids) meant we were prone to bickering.
I remember spending the whole day trying to keep the peace, telling my mum that I loved her and that she was the best mum ever, but there would inevitably be something that set her off. Maybe one of us had whinged that we didn’t want to go somewhere, or we’d talked back, but more often than not, it was something benign like telling one of our relatives that we’d had fast food for dinner the night before.
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt my mum glare at me from across the room in a way that meant that I was going to get in trouble for it later. I’d get scolded for telling “family secrets” and my mum constantly drummed it into me that if I said the wrong thing to the wrong person, then Child Protective Services would take us away from her.
She created this set of rules that meant that I never knew what I was allowed to say, or who I was allowed to say it to. The car rides home from my grandmother’s, where we’d gone to celebrate Mother’s Day with scones and tea or a roast dinner, were painfully silent.
Once we entered the confines of our house, my mum would hiss, “You ruined the one day a year that’s supposed to be about me”. This was often followed by slamming of objects and prolonged punishments of the silent treatment, before eventually telling us she loved us but we needed to learn to be better kids. It was never about her expectations, but about how we were bad, and I spent the whole time I lived with her feeling like I was trying to avoid stepping on a landmine.
I eventually moved out of my mum’s house when I was 17 years old, in the middle of year 11. There were a combination of issues that meant that living with her was completely untenable for me, as I regularly contemplated self-harming or running away. It’s hard to get into the specifics of what happened that led me to that decision (frankly, I think I’d need a whole book to explain), but I still have recurring nightmares that, as a 28-year-old woman, I’ve been forced to move back in with her. In the nightmare, she punishes me for the betrayal I committed by choosing my own survival over a mother who just couldn’t love me like I needed. I wake up, gasping for air and drenched in sweat.
It’s been eleven years since I lived with her, but her presence is felt bigger than ever. Her unpredictable behaviour means that I am always worried about what erratic thing she’s going to do next, and family occasions always seem to set her off. There have been birthdays where she’s appeared at my house unannounced, wishing me an over-the-top happy birthday before adding, “How could you do this to me?” She sits in the corner of family dinners, stewing in her anger and muttering cruel comments.
Her volatility is so unrestrained that I haven’t attended a family birthday, Easter egg hunt or Christmas lunch in years – but that doesn’t stop her from getting her digs in. For example, last Christmas Eve when I’d set up a GoFundMe to raise money for my dog’s expensive medical treatment, my mum proceeded to donate $200 (after seeing that my dad had donated $150) and then asked GoFundMe for a refund. I was devastated. It was her way of saying “Don’t you worry, I’ll always be able to reach you”.
As I approach this Mother’s Day, I’m filled with a grief that feels impossible to communicate. I know that social media is going to be filled with loving tributes to my friends’ equally loving mothers, while I struggle to acknowledge that mine exists. How do I reconcile that a woman who has done such severe emotional damage to me that I am in weekly therapy because of it, is also my mother? Her legacy has impacted me in almost every relationship in my life, platonic and otherwise. I apologise all the time for things I’ve said, for fear I’ve said something that is secretly very awful, when in reality it was “I had pizza for dinner last night”.
As I get older, it’s occurred to me that I don’t know what it feels like to be loved or even how to love properly and healthily. Is it love when you refuse to acknowledge your child, even if they’re crying and begging for you to look at them? Is it love when you tell your child that you wish they’d never been born, and how much easier it would be if they weren’t there? How about in the evenings, when you tell your kids you love them and apologise for the day’s harshness, knowing that you’ll repeat the cycle tomorrow? My attachment to other people is so disregulated and driven by anxiety because I grew up thinking that’s what love was, and I’m scared it’s what’s going to cause me to die alone and unloved.
The longing I feel for a mum who loves me the way that my friends’ mums love them on Instagram sits deep in my gut, but I can also feel it pounding at the back of my throat. For most of the year, it’s contained and manageable but in the lead-up to Mother’s Day it reopens; raw and weeping. A capitalist’s wet dream, much like Valentine’s Day, the last weeks of April are the best time to market girly shit that no one really wants. With every email hawking bath bombs or hand creams or dressing gowns in the name of our mothers, I’m reminded of all of the awful, emotionally-loaded Mother’s Days of my childhood and the many empty Mother’s Days ahead of me.
If you, like me, are also a motherless-but-not-motherless child, please know that I see you and you’re not alone. Even though I don’t know how, I know we’ll be okay.