For those who have a mum who doesn't want a close relationship...

[Xmasdayy]

.... does the rejection ever stop hurting? Does it ever stop being upsetting this sense you are missing out on something?

My mum had a truly horrendous childhood which severely damaged her in probably every way. She was abused by both parents but especially was physically beaten by her mother who ran off with another man and disappeared from my mum's life for many years. Her father was not much better really, was not physically abusive but was emotionally unpleasant and married a woman who didn't really want to be a step mum and who became emotionally abusive to my mum and her sister.

I think because of all of this undealt with and unexamined childhood trauma - mum has always refused to get help - she has never been emotionally available to me as a mum, keeps herself at a distance from me and hasn't been there for me. I do feel very alone in life in that way although not so much now I have a family of my own.

I watch long lost family sometimes because I wonder what it must be like to have that genetic emotional pull towards a mother something I've never really had. As a child I did wonder what it would have been like to be adopted and my real parents had come to get me, just a few examples of subconscious questions coming up I suppose.

This has obviously been very tough for me, being kept at arms length has been so painful and I e made lots of my own mistakes and been interested in unavailable people in the past because of it etc. Never feeling good enough.

I feel very sad for my mum and the cards she was dealt and I always have done. However how do I deal with this constant sadness about the lack of depth in our very surface casual relationship? I have had lots of therapy but I always come back to feeling sad.

I know radical acceptance is probably the answer and just to accept everything for how it is and love myself anyway. Its just hard sometimes.

Tia x

She had a terrible childhood but as @AttilaTheMeerkat has pointed out she had a choice not to give me the same. And didn’t. I can absolutely resonate with the searching for love with a boyfriend (often inappropriate ones) because I felt so unloved

This boyfriend business really resonates with me. I have a 100% track record of picking unsuitable men, and I have no idea why I married DH (divorced for years); I think because deep down it was the knowledge that someone cared for me and wanted to be with me. That couldn't sustain a marriage and he left for someone else. In my heart I don't blame him.

@MrsDanversGlidesAgain i married my first husband because he was a nice man. Ultimately though my mother asked him to keep something from me and he did. At that point, nice man or not I needed someone who wasn’t weak like my Dad. So he had to go. Sounds dramatic but at this point I was earning well and I needed a partner not a dad.

My second (and dare I say, final 😂) DH saw through my mother from day one. And she was very wary of him indeed. The irony of it all was that my sister ended up with a narcissist who also exerts coercive control and has no children (his insistence), no friends and is isolated. She’s the one who’s had to move jobs because she can’t get along with colleagues. Meanwhile unlikeable old me has gone one to be the managing director, the one with a family, the lovely house and the one with friends who are my actual sisters. Had my mother not pitted us against each other from any early age and had my sister not joined in with the emotional abuse I might give a shit about her, but she’s made her bed and she can lie in it. I pointed this out to my mother before she died in a rather delicious moment. The dawning realisation that her golden child was going to be left in old age by herself had escaped her because she was so consumed by wanting me to fail and be the person she had conditioned me to be.

Apart from success on a personal and emotional level, my greatest moment of satisfaction was my prophecy coming true. Years earlier in a rare display of anger I had said to my mother- give her (my sister) everything if it makes you feel better but in the end, it will be me who will be there at the end- you won’t see her for dust….

And reader, this was exactly what happened.

aww thanks. It might seem like a boastful post to those with normative family relationships but to us on here, being able to say ‘do you know what? I’m pretty ok now’ is a huge step.

Good luck at the lunch, you’ve got this 💪

Thank you for this thread; it has been interesting reading, though sad to hear that so many have had similar experiences to my own.

In my own case, my mother has no interest in who I am - she has a vision of a person she thinks I should be and becomes verbally and emotionally abusive if I deviate from this. Although part of her vision is that we are very close which is mind boggling (she couldn't, for example, even tell you something basic like what job I do).

I've recently cut contact with her as I cannot cope with her abuse any more. Similarly to others on here, I can see that she has her own issues from her past, but she could choose to deal with them, and not impose them on me, and she has not. I've also been through a period of griefing - for the mother I should have had and never did. As part of coming to terms with "losing" her, there are so many things I've realise - for example I can't think of a single thing we've done together, just the two of us, after about aged 8, when she stopped reading bedime stories to me. I'm now 50!