It’s Okay if You Don’t Like Your Mother: Here’s Why

I’ve never been “besties” with my mom. 

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She’s always gushed over my oldest brother, despite having three other children, and always cared more about money and status than I understood, but I never thought she was that bad.

Family gatherings were always fairly light and fun. Her delicious food, my best wine, my dad’s jokes filling up the space between us. And then my father died. And maybe it’s the gaping hole his absence left in the large home they shared. Or maybe it’s that now there is no buffer between us, but it’s as if I’m seeing my mother with fresh eyes. And despite my best efforts, (my breathing techniques, my meditations, my long walks, my therapy), I have come to a conclusion, one I’ve been anxious to admit. 

I don’t like my mother 

She is my mom. But she is also human. And for me- she can be toxic. 

My experience of birth motherhood is this: mothers have this inherent connection to their daughters, because moms “made” their daughter. But daughters don’t always have the same level of connection back to their mothers. Oftentimes daughters feel guilty over this lack of connection. However, this is not only okay, but it’s actually a common thing. 

There are many types of mothers: 

• narcissistic 
• those with untreated mental health issues (ADHD, anxiety, depression, etc.)
• those who are adult children of alcoholics
• those who are not holding space for their daughters
• those loving and relating to one of their children more than the rest
• those who are unhappy in their marriages or other significant relationships
• those with unprocessed emotions from their own mother wounds
• those who don’t honor and respect each part of all of their children
• those who didn’t want to be mothers
• those who didn’t have great mothers of their own.

The blame game

The responsibility of fixing these fraught mother-daughter relationships should not fall on the child. When the daughter hits adulthood, viewpoints and responsibility can shift. The parentification that falls to the child is a heavy load to bear and one that the child, until adulthood, didn’t even know she assumed. 

Parentification is a term used to describe when a child unknowingly takes responsibility for the parent, siblings, or family unit.

I did this and didn’t even know I was doing it, but because of my level of empathy for others and willingness to help, I stepped up. Not until much later in my life when working through grief and complicated family dynamics in therapy did I come to this realization. Let me be clear- I was not in charge of paying the mortgage, cooking dinner every night, or making sure my brothers were getting rides to and from practice. I took responsibility in a different way, emotionally. I created a space for others to share and vent and I listened. I created such a loving and supportive place for my family to share that after nearly 40 years, I had overworked my sympathetic nervous system so much that my body was stuck in overdrive. 

This resulted in two things:

1. I did not have a space to share within my own family and had to search for that within myself and outside my family with friends, mentors, or friend’s parents. I had to find my safe people to share with. 

1. I had worked my body so raw that I started to have debilitating pain in my body rendering it impossible to walk some days and had severe loss in my range of motion. So here I am, at age 40, having to relearn how to hold my body, breathe, walk, and manage stress. 

There is a great book by Lindsay Gibson titled, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, that I wish I had earlier in my life to understand how I was feeling. I knew something was off but, until recently, didn’t know I didn’t have to assume all the blame, and I’m not doing that anymore. 

To any mothers out there trying their best to raise their daughters, it is important to build a healthy bond with your children. Keep in mind that, as the adult in the relationship, the mother is setting the tone.

A daughter’s perspective

It’s not your daughter’s responsibility to take care of you… to be grateful for you just because you decided to make her. It’s not her responsibility to want to spend time with you when she feels you treat her poorly, to share her feelings and thoughts with you when you don’t listen, to include you in every party, holiday, or event just because that’s what YOU want. 

As the daughter of an emotionally immature parent, I have had a challenging time emotionally. I didn’t think I was able to regulate my emotions, but I can. I didn’t believe I was a patient person, but I am. I didn’t think I had resilience, but I do. 

You don’t know that your own experience is unhealthy until you grow, meet other people, learn about yourself and then you can see it. You don’t know what you don’t know and you certainly don’t know to analyze your own experience until you hit a wall. I first hit that wall at 25 years old when I realized my mother was not listening to me and trying to control me. I had stopped sharing the intimate details of my life with her and didn’t speak to her for 3 months. Then she showed up at one of my gigs (I’m a musician) and was bombarding me and cry-talking and exclaiming ,“Don’t cut me out!” But I only cut her out because she wasn’t listening to me and trying to control me. And yet, somehow it was my fault. When you stop sharing with someone because you don’t feel safe, regardless of whether they gave birth to you or not, it should open up a dialogue and allow for relational growth. I am never able to share with my mother because she doesn’t listen but still wants me to respect her. 

Respect goes both ways, or at least it should

I am not given the same level of respect as my brothers are given and yet I am also the one who is expected to take care of my mother. This is incredibly triggering for me because she is expecting me to take care of her but she didn’t take care of me. Was I fed? Yes. Did I have a roof over my head? Yes. When I was a baby were my diapers changed? Yes. 

But there is so much more to parenting than that. Things that, in my opinion, are the absolute bare minimum. I was not emotionally supported and that is where I get frustrated. I was being expected to give something I did not receive myself, and made to feel absolutely awful about it. Putting up a barrier with someone who can’t listen and has a huge fragile narcissistic ego is a daunting and pointless task. I’ll never be right and I don’t need to be but I do need to take care of myself in a way that I was not taken care of. And while it breaks my heart that my mother is alone and aging, I can’t reward her bad behavior by allowing her to speak to me the way she has and does, spend time with her, and share my life with her. My heart is broken writing this but I am proud of myself for setting, holding, resetting, and re-holding my boundaries. And keeping myself safe.

Suggestions for a better mother-daughter relationship

The best thing a mother can do for her daughter is to love and support her and cherish her existence. Being a woman is hard enough.  I mean we just got the right to vote embarrassingly recently, so don’t be another reason for your daughter to feel less than. Build her up when she gets bullied in middle school, let her go off to college or even abroad, have the sex talk and actually listen (and maybe even get her on some sort of birth control). Let her date who she wants. Learn to love yet let go, let her drive her own life. 

And with that, you will up your chances of raising a daughter who loves you, feels grateful for you, feels safe with you, and who will want to have you at her holiday gatherings.

After many therapy sessions working through the grief of losing my dad and being able to uncover and label the issues with my mom, I’m learning new coping skills to keep in my tool belt. I’m practicing how to set healthy boundaries for myself to be my best whole person while also meeting my mother where she is- knowing that she will never work on herself the way I know possible. 

All I can do is love, speak my truth, protect myself by being the mother to myself that I needed when I was little, and take the love my mother offers me without resentment. She’s only human and did the best she could.