And I’m afraid of how beautiful you are. How much I love you. How I won’t be able to protect you from this place. From me.1
Someone I know posted an image of their mum on social media and captioned it ‘If I could choose my mum, it would always be you’. For just a moment this made me sad because those feelings are not ones I share about my own mother but then I remembered that my mum is a narcissist and the sadness ebbed into an anger that rattled through my body.
I think that mother/daughter relationships are often the worst. Mothers believe they can defend the most appalling behaviours by saying it’s only because they love you and want the best for you. They think they can bulldoze over the dreams they don’t share with you, not because they want to control you but because they don’t want to see you make the wrong decisions. They think they can comment on your weight, not because they care about what you look like but because they’re worried about your health. They think they can tell you how to raise your children because they’re completely delusional to how their own children have turned out.
I go through mixed emotions with my relationship with my mum, I feel bad for her when I remind myself that this is her first time living life too but then I look at the way she treats me and I know that I would never treat my children that way. She is a master manipulator with no self-awareness and even when called out (me and my sisters have given up trying to coax her to go to therapy) it is always someone else’s fault.
My mum has always taught me to be a strong woman and to stand on my own two feet which I will forever be thankful for but she’s also taught me that I must be thin (I am in fact not thin), I must hide every emotion otherwise I must need medicating, I must agree with everything she says otherwise I am unworthy of her time and I MUST compliment her at any given chance. Who needs the patriarchy to keep us in line when we have mother’s like mine?
For many years I bobbed through the relationship by sticking to these things, I would compliment her even if I didn’t like what she was wearing and I would agree with her on everything she said until, after many years of being a good girl, I broke. And when I broke and I told her how she made me feel and I cried and I screamed and an intervention was called by my sisters after we hadn’t spoken to each other for weeks she said ‘Laura, everything I do in my life is for you’ and that is when I knew all was lost because you can never win against someone who thinks they have revolved their life around you.
I can accept the fact that she has no self-awareness and that she has poor emotional intelligence and that this was probably passed from her mother’s mother to her mother and from her mother to her; I’ve been to therapy and I’ve read the books. But, what I refuse to accept, is that we have to go through life letting our mothers project their insecurities and fears onto us because they are our mothers and they only want the best for us. No one is denying that mothers love their daughters but sometimes love isn’t enough.
It must be noted that I have not written this to throw myself a pity party but to let you know that you are not alone if this is how you feel about your mum. My mother is the only person that I can both love with every fibre of my being and hate with every fibre of my being and those feelings are hard to navigate.
Rouge, Mona Awad
This was an emotional one. I have a complicated relationship with my mother. I’ve learned the hard way, some communication is good, but I need to limit our time together. I’ve worked very hard to draw boundaries to keep a balance, and most of the time she respects my boundaries, but just a few weeks ago she violated my boundaries and it’s been hard to talk to her since then.
As I became an adult I let go of some of my resentment of the times she wasn’t good enough, and realized she was trying her best. It doesn’t forgive her bad judgement, but it allows me to forgive her when she didn’t know any better.
I can’t change who she is, but I have seen her genuinely make efforts to improve our relationship. And now after so many years of working on things, sometimes she can be a good friend. It’s a complicated relationship, and I think it always will be.
We used to watch the Gilmore Girls together. Now I watch it and I see how toxic the relationships truly are, and also reminds me of how complex mother-daughter relationships can be.
Humans are complicated. ❤️🩹🫤
this was the understanding i needed to hear on my birthday bc idk What this family drama is rn 🥲