Parents normally put their children’s feelings first. Not the other way around, right? Whilst you were treading on egg shells, putting her feeling first, your mum will not have been emotionally available. I think this is similar, at times, to being the child of an emotionally distant father and your childhood doesn’t sound easy and perhaps traumatic.
You say you agonise over everything you’ve said and done. From her reaction, I imagine your mum will be doing the same thing. What I’m thinking is you’re both maybe acting from a place of trauma and much as you say she feels rejected, I’m thinking that part of you also might feel rejected. Is that correct? It’s just I’m trying to figure why else would you apologise for something you haven’t even done?
It also sounds as if you might be monitoring yourself, your reactions, what you say a lot when you’re around her. Maybe I’m wrong. This is my interpretation based on my upbringing. All I can say is that it really isn’t your job to convince your mum you have enjoyed her company.
From what I’m reading, I think you may have been the subject of parentification. This is where the roles of parent and child are somehow switched. It doesn’t necessarily mean physically. It can also be looking after a parent’s emotional well-being. This causes trauma in a child, which is then brought into adulthood, with the dynamic set between parent and adult child continuing.
If you only have these feelings around your mum, brava. I’ve struggled a lot with esteem issues and more besides over the years, which impacted every area in my life, including irrational fears of being dumped by my dh and so forth.
From what my mother says about her father, he also was emotionally distant. Her mother was equally not particularly loving and my mother’s parenting was similar to that of her mother’s. Until I got decent therapy, I had a tape of her voice running constantly in my head telling me what to do. Her parenting was authoritarian and didn’t equip me to believe I could make decisions for myself, so until that point, I didn’t know how to truly separate from her.
At 58, your mum is definitely not too old to seek help herself. Right now she is choosing not to, which of course you cannot control anymore than you can control or read her reactions, thoughts or state of happiness. We say things like x person makes me happy or unhappy, but happiness and contentment are internal feelings. It isn’t that a person makes us happy or unhappy. Rather it is our reaction to something another person says or does, which dictates our mood. And it sounds as though you are pushing and pulling yourself all over the place to try to attain this state of mum being happy without regard for your own.
Hopefully you’re not as affected as I was and to an extent still am. Therapy was the only way for me. It did make me a better person, helped me to set my own boundaries as I had none and set me up to ride the tumultuous storm of the teenage years… well, dd is 13 going on 20, so I have a way to go yet…
I don’t doubt these days that my mother loves me, albeit I truly thought she didn’t as a child, which was extremely destabilising. Your mum also loves you very much by the sound of it too.
I hope you have a good day today. 