My mother and I, between authority and misunderstanding

When I was little, my mother and I were not close at all. I have no happy or pleasant memories with her.

She was never very tactile or demonstrative emotionally. (maybe it’s because she came to France when she was eight, due to the Vietnam War).

I only remember those long moments when he yelled at me, blaming me for not having ” only 18/20 “, Why'” memorizing is within anyone’s reach », and hours spent making me remember my lessons.

A strict mother

I had fifteen minutes to memorize, then I had to be able to recite everything to the point. If I ever took more than two seconds to remember a step, I had to start over and she didn’t stop until she was satisfied. I often ended up in tears because of this…

He wanted me to wear pink skirts and play with dolls, while I wanted to play football, put on my older brother’s things and tinker with my father.

In public everything was fine in the best of worlds, she was proud of me and my brothers. Besides, she often had affectionate gestures with them and with my cousins; the last time she gave me a kind of imitation hug (i.e. she grabbed my head to put it on her shoulder) i was fourteen, we were in a bowling alley and her current boyfriend was filming us …

Also, he never met my best friends from college. For each outing, afternoon or birthday, I needed the numbers of the parents of each child present, their address and I had to tell my mother who was coming, what time everyone was leaving, how and with whom, what we were going to do and where…

Because of this, I didn’t start seeing my friends outside of class until I was in high school.

High school and change

For years, every day, she scolded me for fifteen minutes because I didn’t do something like that (homework, tidy up the room, wash the dishes…). When I entered high school, I went to live with my father over an hour’s drive from his house.

When I saw her over the weekend, she was mad at me because I” he had abandoned them, her and my little brother “, That I ” believed in a hotel at home “. It ended in a very bizarre way two years later, just before the new year: one day, one morning, around 11, he left without saying anything (probably during a business meeting).

He had left no instructions for lunch. So I started cooking for my brother and I around 1pm. When she came home about 20 minutes later, she yelled at her because it wasn’t what she had planned to eat.

I broke down, packed my bags and went to my grandparents who lived in his own village before joining my father.

After that, I refused to see her for three months.

I was happy: the conversation was almost normal, I was finally able to have a semblance of dialogue with her!

I sent her an email to express my feelings, to show her that I wasn’t as clueless as she had been under the impression. I don’t know exactly what she said, but she didn’t seem to want to know anything. Arguing with her is not possible because she thinks she is always right.

A month after the email, I received the results of the white high school diploma: I took the opportunity to call him and hear from him. I was happy: the conversation was almost normal, I was finally able to have a semblance of dialogue with her!

It was the first time he had seemed sincerely kind to me. I spent the next weekend at her house, and she hasn’t raised her voice at me since, and sometimes she almost seems to care about me.

A complicated story

Before this crisis, the contrasts were one-sided: she shouted and if I wanted to answer she answered” SHUT UP ». I never dared to insist because I was always afraid he would slap me. However, even now, I constantly avoid topics that concern me, and she does the same.

My cousins ​​recently told me that during the three months I refused to see her, she called her brothers every night to find out what to do, because the situation was difficult for her.

There are many things like that that I learned from other family members, because his pride prevents him from telling me to my face. ; even if I brought it up, he deflected the conversation in a way that made me feel guilty about something else.

He’s also used me often to annoy my father (who I don’t necessarily have the best ties with). The vagaries of life meant I had to be with a friend to finish high school.

Since my mother had my little brother in custody (the eldest was independent), he didn’t want to help me pay the rent and nagged me (I realized it was annoying much later) to write a letter to a family court judgeto force my father to pay me alimony – I was of age before I entered high school, so it was up to me to write it.

The judge ruled in my favor, and my father owed several months’ worth of pension, which he gave me by deducting the cafeteria bills from the total he owed me. My mother didn’t like it and she harassed me again (just before the final exams) to make me sign a letter that she wanted to give to a bailiff …

From the first letter to the judge, and from the moment tensions subsided, two years have passed, which have not been easy.

A minimalist mother-daughter relationship

Of everything that happens to me in my life, I tell my mother only the bare minimum. He doesn’t know what studies I want to undertake, for example (and even if I told him clearly, he would forget about it three days later).

It took me a year to tell him about my current boyfriend. And again, it was my stepfather who broached the subject asking me about him, asking me when he was coming home. My mother…he ignored. Simply.

She doesn’t support me in anything, finding more problems than positive aspects in my ideas and projects. For example, I want to change apartments because the one he forced me to take even though I’m paying the bills and the rent is too expensive for me.

I want to make a roommate with a very good friend, which she refuses because she only sees problems there, such as the principle of joint and several guarantees, and wonders how she would pay me the rent if my friend moved out. (while my mother has a very comfortable income).

I remain convinced that even if I manage to get a master’s or doctorate, travel the world in an honorable profession and at a good salary, she will never be satisfied with me, she will always find the little detail that allows her to reproach me for something.

Even though, by now, the situation has calmed down and we can almost have a normal dialogue (if anyone else is in the room), she keeps telling me things like ” You are worse than a handicapped person ” OR ” Any dick can do it “, which I prefer to ignore…

I sincerely hope that one day we will have a real, somewhat healthy relationship.

In short…

My mother bore me and raised me, but I never felt that mother-daughter bond I saw in others.

As I told you, I moved in with a friend when I was in high school so I could finish my studies. The day I arrived at his house, his mother said to me:

“As long as you live under this roof, I will consider you my daughter: I will scold you like her, I will take care of you like her, I will love you like her. »

This is where I started accepting motherly love from people other than my mother. At the moment, it is with my boyfriend’s mother that this bond is being created that I have been missing: she is controlling me, we laugh a lot together, etc. But I try to take a step back, because I think it’s not up to her to give me what I expect.

Even though I’m not close to my mother, she never updates me on anything (she’s already been in the hospital several times for operations, and each time I only learned after weeks), that I never hear from her and neither does she, even if I can’t stand his character and his ways, I try to visit her at least once a month, because she’s still my mother and I have to deal with her.

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