An unusual estrangement

[notsomarvelousmrsmaisel]

I realised yesterday that next week it'll be 10 years since I last saw my mother. I was 27. I'm about to turn 38.

She lives overseas. We last saw one another in June 2015. We haven't spoken on the phone since 2016.

We’ve had sporadic e-mails since then, and my last 6 e-mails to her (in 2020) went unanswered.

All the threads and articles I see online are about adult children going NC with their parents.

But my mother went NC with me.

She was always mercurial; incapable of seeing things from other people's points of view, spiteful and cutting, martyrish - but also charismatic, hilarious, enchanting, vulnerable... exhausting.

I know now from the odd mention from family members that she’s lost down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories; in and out of hospital from accidents doing stupid things.

So my life is, without a doubt, more peaceful without her in it. I'm finally breaking the patterns she trained me in as a child. I know she’s not, and never will be, the mother I wish I had.

But it hurts to be the child that a mother doesn’t want – even a mother like mine.

I do miss her. And 10 years feels like such a long time.

Has anyone else experienced no-contact this way round? How do you reconcile yourself with being motherless in this way, and for so long?

It’s tough and hits you out of nowhere. Mine chose to stay with my paeophile and rapist father saying she loved him too much. Even while he went to jail admitting crimes against me. She didn’t just walk away from me, she walked away from 3 grandchildren. It’s been 10 years and still makes no sense so it’s best to just not think and focus on those that matter.

I'm sorry you've been through that, @TwinklyPeachScroller - that's huge.

Most days it doesn't show up consciously for me at all – but knowing this big 'anniversary' is coming up, it's suddenly got very loud.

I keep thinking about the fact that I didn't know at the time it would be the last time I'd see her.

I’m sorry for what you’ve gone through. It’s so painful and it creates a wound that is really difficult for people who have “normal” families to understand.

My experience isn’t quite like yours. I definitely was the one who went NC, but it was after years of struggling to try to have a relationship with my mum. She did do some horrible things to me and to my children, but she also made it nearly impossible to heal our relationship after those things happened. She would disappear for months at a time. She would say I want to fly to see you so we can talk about things (also lives abroad), but then disappear and tell friends I refused to see her, even when my response was, let me know about dates.

It sounds strange to say, but it was very much like a husband who doesn’t want to be the bad guy who ends a marriage with a really lovely woman, so he pokes and pokes and pokes until she breaks and says enough. And then he can be like, look, she ended it! She never was committed after all. This was her plan from the start. And he gets lots of sympathy from everyone who feels bad for the poor guy just dumped by his wife, even though he’s secretly tickled at how it turned out and now he’s free as the wind with his reputation in tact.

In my case, being in my life and in my children’s lives meant my mum would be forced to face her issues. She’s 75 now and has been running from her issues all her life. It was easier to get rid of me (but make it look my fault for all the sympathy) than to have to change her behaviour. So she just sort of abandoned ship.

I do still hear from her a couple times a year by email (she will only email 🤷🏻‍♀️). But I don’t engage. It’s a well worn pattern. If I responded, there would be a bit of back and forth, and then she would say how horrible I am being to her, and then she’d disappear, not to be heard from for another 5 months. I can’t be doing with that drama anymore. So I just ignore her.

As for coming to terms with being motherless, I do find myself latching on to older women and thinking a bit like, maybe you could be my mummy! I don’t mean actually, because that would be creepy. 😂 But I do often find myself fantasising about what it would be like to have a mother.

Even when my mum was still around, she wasn’t maternal. She was judgemental and stunted and almost expected me to parent her. She was also my only family. My dad died when I was 18. I am an only child, no other close family. So at 40, I’d lost both parents and had no siblings, aunties, cousins. I look at people with parents who meet them for coffee or have them over for meals or plan a family holiday and think how weird!

I just cannot imagine what it would be like to have parents around as an adult. It’s a very strange thing to me. It’s only when I think of it like that that I realise how different life is for other people.

That said, I don’t know if you have children OP, but having my own children has been really healing. This BS stops with me. I am absolutely not perfect as a parent, but my children know that I will always have their backs and will never abandon them. I can do for them what my mum couldn’t or wouldn’t do for me.