Mommie Dearest
May 31, 2006 by NYM
Living alone in NYC as a single person these past nine years has been a wonderful experience. And like everything in life, living in this city has also presented much on the other side of the coin. But I guess that you have to take the good with the bad. Among the many challenges I have had to overcome I can list redundancies, a career change, being scammed a couple of times, apartment issues, dodgy friends, illness, a terrorist attack, a black-out, harrowing taxi rides, bad dates, bad sex…you get the picture. All of these things and more I’ve overcome. Yet, there is one cross that I continue to bear. One cross that I cannot get off my back…My mother.
As I’ve expressed on my blog, recently, my parents are coming for a visit this coming weekend. The impending visit has got me all in a tizzy. And I don’t mind admitting that I’m ashamed to be an intelligent, independent 33 year old woman who continues to allow her mother to have such emotional control over her.
I know that I’m not alone in my angst. Nearly every woman I know, both single and married, with children and without, professional and educated and successful, have the same issues with their mothers.
Aren’t mothers supposed to be loving and nurturing? Instead of positive reinforcement and caring, what most of us end up with is complaining, nagging, put downs, and even verbal abuse. It’s a sick and twisted dynamic. Instead of my mother telling me that she’s proud of me for the things I’ve accomplished, all I get is a trail of abuse and character assassination because I moved away from my family, because I’m single, because I don’t want children, because I occasionally have dishes in my sink, because sometimes when my lipstick rubs off I forget to reapply it, because I don’t want to go shopping and she does…You get the picture.
Up until a couple of years ago, I would allow these encounters with my mother to destroy me and to rattle the ever-fragile foundation of self-esteem that my mother always seems hell-bent on destroying. However, after a particularly awful verbal assault from my mother when I was home on a Christmas visit, I scooped up my self-respect and hobbled back to NYC. It took a long time for me to heal from that one, but eventually I was strong enough and confident enough to see clearly that all of this garbage that she throws is from her own can.
Mothers are people and people have issues. I don’t know if there’s some crazy evolutionary Darwin-type theory for mothers’ penchant for tearing their daughters apart, but I see my own mother and realize that she’s in the process of realizing that her life expectations are not going to be met. She will not live out her twilight years as her mother had surrounded by children and grandchildren. Both my sister and I have moved away, and though my sister is married and wants children, I don’t anticipate a walk down the aisle anytime soon, nor is it probable that I’ll have children. I also think she has a personality conflict with me, and I don’t live up to whatever Holly Hobby daughter stereotype that she may have had.
I don’t know what the answer is here (please let me know if YOU do!), but I do know that I’m not alone in the world with my daughter/mother issues. I guess it’s just one more thing that we women can add to our already full plates.
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Someone once said, “Of course mothers know how to push our buttons. They installed them.”
Perfect!
My mother was the same way. Of course, she had intense issues that your mom doesn’t have, but it amounted to the same thing. From the age of nine on, she didn’t have a kind word for me. I think she blamed me for her own lack of a life and accomplishments. I finally cut her out of my life when I was 29.
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