Letting Go

Author's note: What follows below is one version of my familial history. I know every story has at least two sides, and that my interpretation is just that: an interpretation. I do not intend this writing to be an indictment of my mother or for it to be accepted as the whole truth. It is intended as catharsis or a self-reflection. Most importantly, it is the truth as I experienced it.

When people who don’t know me very well learn that I don’t have any contact with my mother, their reactions range from incredulous to horrified. Understandably so, because the situation radically defies convention. Isn’t it unnatural to sever the most primitive, basic bond of all human relationships?

A recent New York Times article gave an account about the little-explored dilemma of what adults can do about a “toxic” parent (i.e., a parent who causes harm to the adult child). It’s an interesting problem: if you’re in a bad dating relationship, you break up with the person. If your spouse is making you miserable, you get a divorce. But what can you do when cutting off the source of your misery also involves severing ties with those who gave you life?

I have struggled with this question for most of my adult life. Not having a conventional mother, I became aware of the “toxic parent” phenomenon at a very early age.

That’s because my mother was a woman who balked at the inconveniences of motherhood. She doled out the basics, because she had to. I was always fed, clothed, sheltered and educated. But I was rarely adored, instructed or even paid attention to.

For example, while conventional mothers seemed to wake up early, dress their kids in neatly ironed uniforms, braid their hair in two pigtails and pack tasty lunches, my mother was still in bed when I woke up and threw on the uniform I’d laundered myself (at age seven). I’d pack my own lunch and comb through my own hair. My mother insisted on keeping my hair short because it “looked so cute.” Yet, in reality, her real motivation for short hair was that it saved her the trouble of contending with my mass of tangled black curls.

As I grew older, this rhythm played out in myriad variations, like movements in a concerto.

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First Movement: Other kids’ moms take them to play dates, gently guiding the little ones through the obstacle courses of social interaction and friendships. Mine does not bother to make friends with the other moms, hence no useful play dates. Her needs are painfully and obviously triumphant. For example, on a vacation to Disney World, I want so badly to go on some hyped-up ride and had fixated on it for at least a week in advance of the trip. We get there, because she “doesn’t feel like doing that,” we don’t. This becomes a recurring melody.

Second Movement: Other kids’ moms attend their soccer matches and parent-teacher conferences. Mine skips such events, dismissing them as unnecessary. She does not come to my speech tournaments or tennis matches, doesn’t even ask when and where they are. Any request is an imposition. She is negative, critical and makes no attempt to hide her vague contempt for the role that’s been foisted upon her. “I never would have had children, if it had been up to me,” she comments with frequency—no regard given to the weight of those words. The slightest argument with her comes at a steep price: weeks of shut-out silence, the kind where she does not speak to me until I have begged forgiveness over and over again.

Third Movement: My parents divorce and she moves out. The house is not much different without her presence. Lots of silence and not much activity. Later, my father remarries and I decide to try living with my mother instead. She expresses outrage at having to give up her one-bedroom apartment and sobs hysterically in my presence. I am not welcome. I really never have been. “I need to worry about taking care of myself first,” she says. “Because if I lose my job, I won’t be able to afford anything more than a small apartment. Your father has more money, see if you can stay there instead.”

What kind of mother refuses to take in her own children? I am appalled. The crack that widened into a rift becomes a valley, carved out by the enormous power of her refusal. I become distant, but I do not give up—not yet. She moves to Europe on a whim, cuts off my dental insurance and her employer’s scholarship to me. She moves back, and expects my heartfelt sympathies for how difficult her life has been. She’s in and out of my life whenever it suits her, reappearing just long enough to remind me of the peripheral role I occupy—of what I do not mean to her.

Fourth Movement: I start grad school in Egypt, and it is a disaster. I phone relatives frequently, recounting the latest in a series of misfortunes that happened there, and most are sympathetic. She hangs up the phone when I call at 7:00 a.m., while she cries and says, “You’re dropping out of grad school and moving back to the States. I’m sleepy, can’t talk now.”

I move back to the States. I start law school in Boston, and when I come home for the holidays my first year, she does not make time to see me. Says she is too busy with work and classes and friends to take any time off to spend with me. I am appalled, again. And that is emblematic of everything that has passed and everything that will come to pass. The Before and the After are disappointingly similar, as familiar as one’s native language. I cannot change it, and I cannot unlearn it. It is imprinted in my brain, but the effort of speaking it suddenly exhausts me to the point where I can’t do it anymore. I no longer wish to participate in this dialogue of reproach, neglect and apathy. Something in me, some force, propels me away that December morning. I pack my bags and change my flight. She doesn’t contact me. Time passes; some months, half a year, and then longer. I lose track.

Fifth Movement (the Last Straw): And suddenly there is a box on my doorstep with nothing inside other than a handmade wool scarf (in July?) and a Chinese embroidery translated as “Love.” There is no apology, of course, because, as she once told me, she doesn’t believe in apologies. I finish law school and invite her to my graduation. I naively hope this is the beginning of a peace accord. But it isn’t—it’s more like a truce, or a cease-fire. I get a job back home and suddenly we’re living in the same city again. And for awhile things were good, truly. Until I needed her help, needed to impose and create inconveniences. Here we were, two decades and many transcontinental moves later, in the exact same place. Home. Where she still couldn’t see past her own reflection in the mirror.

An Assessment and a Failed Confrontation: At that point, I began to seriously reflect on the scars all these years of battle have left on me. Corrosive insecurity? Check. Fear of abandonment? Check. Low self-esteem? Check. Inability to relate well to others? Got that, too. I had collected neuroses like other kids collected Barbie dolls or baseball cards. And in realizing all of that, the sense of betrayal, loneliness and anger simmering under the surface for years finally broke through a barrier and spewed out, full-force. And after years of resisting it, I decided to let it move past me, buoyed by its velocity. I explained my version of our history to her, but she could not see it—not even a part of it—from my perspective.

Every story I recounted for her was met with firm denial and self-righteousness. “Who are you to tell me how I should have behaved instead?” she’d ask. “No one. No one at all. And that’s the problem.” I calmly told her I couldn’t engage with her anymore, not until she acknowledged some of what she put me through. She hasn’t. She may never. And so it goes.

Letting Go: The time and the emotional distance have given me what she never could: a better sense of self-worth. I breathe easier now because I’m free of the ever-present sense of being let down by her again. Despite, or perhaps because, of this history, I’ve developed a resiliency that amazes me sometimes. And I’ve learned to do for myself what I could never count on her to do. I’m lucky to have extended family and lifelong friends whose doors are always open to me, without question. There is no pity in this and no shame. I realize now that for years I foolishly sought a missing piece to a phantom puzzle. It is only in letting go that I feel whole.

M. Joseph is an attorney who practices litigation at an international law firm in the Midwest.