I’ll start by saying I am currently on a waitlist for a therapist, because I’ve realized recently how much this is affecting me. In the meantime, I hope I can share my situation and wonder if anybody else has been through something similar and how they’ve coped.
I grew up with a single mother who struggles with mental illness. My father has never been in the picture (wanted her to abort), and she had me at 20. She went through many partners, including a horrible step dad who stuck around for the bulk of my adolescence. My mom is very loving and affectionate to me, and despite the picture I’m painting, really tried her best to give me a good life.
Due to her illness, she has struggled financially her whole life. This meant my grandfather essentially had to step in and pay for both of our lives, while being the full time caretaker to my grandmother with MS. He sacrificed so much to make sure I had everything I needed, and I managed to keep up appearances at school and hide (for the most part) what separated me from my privileged peers and friends.
Fast forward to me as a 34 year old woman – I have a great career, and a good partner, and have accomplished a lot in my professional and personal life. I have a decent size group of close friends, and several hobbies I’m passionate about. Mostly, I ignore my painful childhood where I always felt poor, lonely and different than everyone else and like I always had something to hide. But my relationship with my mother brings me back with every conversation.
Yesterday, she asked me for money for the first time. She has a job that over works her and under pays her. Her and her useless husband (married when I was 20) got themselves into awful debt, and barely make it paycheque to paycheque. Currently, things are very tight for them. I also need to add, my mom periodically asks my aunt and uncle for money, and they have definitely built up a resentment for her because of it.
She often uses the line “I have an illness”, and she’s right. A big part of my brain understands this, and is angry at the other side of my brain for not having more empathy. I feel so much resentment from years of watching her take/beg my family for money, making poor choice after poor choice, and can’t believe she is now coming to me for it. I gave it to her, because I’m not stone yet, but I’m conflicted on how I should deal with this, and how I should be feeling.
I’m not sure what I expect to get out of this post – I suppose I’m just feeling very alone, and the childhood embarrassment of not having a mother who can provide for me is seeping out. I see my friends who still get help from their parents, and lean on their parents for advice, and mourn that I’ll never have that. Is there anybody out there who can relate to this type of pain? Am I a horrible person for not having more empathy for my mother?
Edited to add: I don’t think I want children, for a multitude of reasons, but this issue cuts deep to my core and certainly weighs heavy on the side of don’t reproduce. Being 34 and feeling time not on my side, I also mourn that I don’t have the support I see so many people around me have, and wonder if I would feel differently about having children if I had a different childhood. Bit of a side salad, but I wanted to mention as they feel very connected.
Edit 2: A comment made me realize I may have downplayed the intensity of her mental illness. She is bipolar and Schizoaffective, and is on very heavy medication for it. There were 3 or 4 periods of my childhood where she would think she was fine and go off her meds, and end up in the hospital for weeks or months at a time.
Comments
I think you need validation, and here it is sis—it’s okay to be resentful of her for making poor decisions because two things can be true at once—she’s very sick and she makes bad decisions.
You don’t resent her for being sick, you resent the choices she makes that create problems for the entire family.
Therapy should help a lot, but make sure you get the right one. If it’s not a good fit at first, keep looking until you get the right one.
Bottom line, you have every right to feel the way that you feel and coping skills through therapy will help. Best of luck. 💕
I mean…she has an illness yes, what is she doing about it? Did she go to extensive therapy? Did she talk to her doctor and try different medications to treat it? Did she find healthy coping techniques? Did she support friends and family in enforcing healthy boundaries or their own therapy or family therapy to ensure that they were not at the blunt end of her symptoms?
A lot of us struggle with mental health issues, and yet many of us also manage to seek help for it so that we don’t hurt the people we love or ourselves. I have mental health issues. I have also been abused by people who had mental health issues, and yet magically I’ve never abused anyone. I don’t think I’m special that I’m the exception. I’ve hurt plenty of people as a result of my mental illness, but I’ve never allowed that to escalate to the point where it has build upon years of bad behavior.
Not saying your mom was abusive. Mostly she sounds unreliable, financially irresponsible, and generally someone who can’t have your back. You’re not a bad person for wishing things were different. Therapy will help you learn to accept her as she is, and to decide from that point on if there are aspects about her that still add to your life or if she’s become a detriment to your wellbeing, and how to proceed from there.
You have every right to feel resentful of a parent you had to parent with, also, one who uses her mental illness to manipulate everyone into helping her. Give her the number to a local pantry and church. That’s all that’s required of you.
My mom eventually took stock of her life and realized she would need to figure it out on her own. I was already in my 20s when this happened. I disagree with how she did it, but she married a much older wealthy man, who died, and during her widower years, she met another much older wealthy man and stayed married to him until he died. She never had to work again, and no one had to take care of her.
In other words, she wasn’t too mentally ill to figure out a way for herself.
Something that helped me was to start picking incidences from my childhood, writing about them and how my mom handled them. Then I would write how I would have parented my child in that exact situation. (You don’t have to want kids to do this- it just helps to see where your mentality is different)
You have to allow yourself to be angry for a while. Therapy will help you discover the source of that anger.
It’s a long, long process to heal. You might uncover more than you realize during this process.