Estranged Mothers and Daughters

Mother’s who couldn’t mother

Some of our mothers didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to look outside of themselves. Some were hooked on pills, men, or alcohol. Some were trying to survive themselves. They’d been hurt or abused and had their depth of trauma to deal with. A kid was too much.

When moms feel like they can’t help their kids, they in turn hurt them. They feel helpless, and so they do what they know, which is running away or lashing out.

I have many friends who are estranged from their mothers. One friend in particular hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother for over ten years. She emancipated herself at 16, and although things looked normal from the outside, her mother had a mental illness that made her unpredictable and scary. Time and time again she tried to rectify things with her mother and things would be okay for a short time until her mom was flirting with her boyfriend, lashing out and crying about something, or being irrational and abusive.

My own mother was an alcoholic. She got pregnant at 22 with a man she hardly knew. He gave her money for an abortion as he was 19 and facing prison time. She went to the abortion clinic but didn’t follow through with it.

Because of my upbringing and multiple abusive boyfriends of my mother, alcoholism and drug addiction running rampant, darkness and fighting, I followed right in her footsteps. I found myself on a park bench at 16 conceiving a baby, I found myself in dirty hotels doing drugs and drinking, and I found myself losing all of my morals and values through my addiction.

I became someone who just wanted to escape from the pain. Someone who had witnessed domestic abuse, feared for her life around her mom's boyfriend after countless episodes of abuse, and even plotted his murder.

I feared for our lives.

This is trauma. It could be defined as complex trauma. It’s when scary events happen over and over again and your caregivers are unpredictable.

It’s when as a child and teenager I ran away to call the police multiple times and no one ever asked to speak with me. My mom’s boyfriend would drive away and the next day it was like nothing happened. The messes were cleaned up, my mom’s glasses would get fixed and a few months would go by before their voices started to escalate again and the doom set it.

It was road trips where my mom drank so much she peed her pants. Driving through windy roads with him shouting obscenities at passersby, the music so loud I couldn’t breathe and could only feel my impending death as we drove right of the side of the road, and then it was us in my bed hiding from him as he yelled “FUCK YOU” to everyone driving by our low-income apartment.

He died at 49. He was a hurt man that hurt everyone around him because he had been hurt as a child.

Why wouldn’t a mother leave him if she saw he was endangering her child’s life?

Why wouldn’t she leave him when he beat her the first time?

Why wouldn’t she leave him when her daughter called her crying most days while she was at work as he was abusing her?

This is called co-dependency. Even though he didn’t bring in any income and she could have easily kicked him out, their “love” was too strong. The bond of addiction was too strong.

Even though she slept on the couch for years, hiding from him and his stinky wrath, it was better than being alone. Maybe she held on to a few good times they had or maybe she felt like this is what she was worth.

When her four-year-old daughter was molested by some older boys she seemed concerned but we never spoke of it again.

When her daughter was 16 and pregnant she took her to the clinic and picked her up. They went through the drive-thru at Jack in the Box, and that was that.

Something in me clicked when I got handcuffed at 21 and thrown in the back of a police car. I got scared enough that I didn’t want my life to look like hers.

I believe God intervened.

I have to believe there was a reason I was saved from the darkness of that life.

I just celebrated 26 years of sobriety.

Nobody clapped for me or patted me on the back, but I know why I have to stay.

My mom died at 55 of alcoholism.

I am a mother of two boys who have never seen their mother drink.

I am proud of my mothering.

I have a passion for surrounding my kids and caring for them.

As I work to heal from my own childhood, I help kids with their own trauma.

My life has come full circle.