Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters

by Forward, Susan

  JAN: “Mom likes to send me clippings from the newspaper or magazines about other women’s marriages and successes. Or she calls me up and says things like, ‘Did you hear about your cousin Amy? I heard her new boyfriend is taking her to the south of France for three weeks… .’ I sure didn’t want to have that conversation, so I said, ‘That’s nice for her,’ hoping that would end it. And my mother’s reply was, ‘It sure is… . Why can’t you find someone like that?’ She made me feel terrible, and it was impossible for me to feel anything but resentful of my cousin’s good fortune. I hated feeling that way.”

  There’s no need for her to say it directly. The message you take in is all too clear—you’ve lost a race you didn’t even know you were in. You’re not as pretty or as sexy as your cousin. What’s wrong with you?

  If you have brothers and sisters, your competitive mother may encourage lifelong rivalries among you that give her the superior sense of being in control of the outcome, and therefore the winner, of what may be a charged contest for her approval.

  On her whim, one child may be deemed the golden one who can do no wrong, while another becomes the family’s scapegoat. If you’ve frequently been cast in the scapegoat role, you may suddenly find yourself in favor, close to her for a time—just as you were when you were young. But if something—your spark, your smile, your solo in the choir—threatens her, you’ll quickly find another sibling in your place.

  As you and your siblings grow up, she often keeps you engaged in the family loyalty battle by dispensing and withholding favors in the highly charged arena of money, gifts, and inheritances. These battles may well be a window into the roots of your mother’s sense of deprivation; it’s quite possible that she’s reenacting old patterns between her own sisters and brothers when she manipulates you and your siblings. But this time, while her own kids start to be jealous of one another, she can remain above the fray. This time, she wins.

  You’ll Never Be Able to Please Her

  Despite all this, many adult daughters of severely narcissistic women hold fast to the hope that they can repair their relationships with their mothers and that their mothers will somehow become more loving.

  What you want to believe is that she’s got your well-being at heart. And the intensity of that desire can take you by surprise.

  JAN: “I was over at my mom’s the other day, and after lunch, she told me she’d found an old album in the back of the linen closet. She had put it on the coffee table and we started to go through it. It was full of old photos of me as a little girl, and some shots from a trip we took to New York when I was little. I hadn’t seen those photos in years. We sat there looking at them for the longest time, and they brought so many memories back. I can’t believe it, but I miss that mom so much. I just wish I could make her happy.”

  I’m sad to say that that’s highly unlikely. Narcissistic mothers are close to impossible to please.

  Daughters resist accepting this. They keep hoping for the perfect words, the perfect gesture, that will let them hear the words “Thank you” and “I love you” from mothers who so rarely express real affection and gratitude. Dana, the daughter of the drama queen mother, whom you met at the beginning of this chapter, told me this poignant story:

  DANA: “I decided to throw a birthday party for Mom’s sixty-fifth.. I was going to make it very special—have it catered and decorate the house with balloons—I thought she would love that, she would be the center of attention, and that would really please her. I invited several family members and some of her friends.

  “I had spent several days looking for just the right present. I knew she liked Asian antiques, and I finally found an exquisite old piece of Chinese sculpture. I had to dig into savings for it, but I figured, ‘What the hell.’ As soon as she opened it, it was obvious from the look on her face she didn’t like it and she made no attempt to hide her reaction. After everyone left, I felt pretty let down. The next morning she calls up, and of course I thought she was going to thank me—it really was a lovely party—but instead the first thing she says is—not even ‘Hello, how are you?’—it’s, ‘Why did you have to let everyone know how old I am? Some of the people there didn’t know. Did you deliberately set me up to be humiliated?’

  “I just wanted to cry. Nothing I do is ever enough.”

  Even the most well-intentioned act or statement can be distorted through the narcissist’s self-referential lens and her insatiable need to look good. If she perceives that something was meant to embarrass or diminish her in any way, you’re likely to find yourself facing her suspicious accusations. The relationship between narcissism and paranoia hasn’t been fully explored. But when the narcissist takes one of your benevolent gestures as a deliberate attempt to embarrass her, you can feel the connection.

  What You See Is What You Get

  Mothers with NPD sometimes raise your hopes by agreeing to go with you into therapy, but they do not respond well to the process. They lack two crucial elements for change—self-awareness and the ability to be introspective—which makes counseling all but a charade. As long as they can blame everyone else for not filling their insatiable demand for attention and adulation, they can successfully avoid responsibility for their own damaging behavior. They’re good at that, and because they rely on it to feel better, they have no reason to change.

  These mothers are in the grip of a deeply ingrained personality disorder. And that behavior is not just situational—it is at their core.

  Please don’t forget, as we explore this difficult territory, that your own core is very different from your mother’s. The harmful behaviors you’ve learned from her and the pain you’ve carried with you for so long are not a permanent legacy. As I will remind you throughout this book, despite what she’s told you, you are the healthy one. You can change.

  Chapter 3

  The Overly Enmeshed Mother

  “You are my whole life.”

  You’ve probably heard of the well-known humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. The far less noble group of women you’ll meet in this chapter are Mothers Without Borders. The enmeshed mother looks to her daughter to fulfill her need for companionship, give her a meaningful identity, and provide vicarious excitement. You are her everything.

  At times the closeness the overly enmeshed mother offers seems to be just what every daughter of any age craves. There’s a certain warmth between the two of you, and there can be genuine appreciation of you and your accomplishments. But her definition of “closeness,” you discover even when you’re quite young, can be suffocating, invasive, and unilateral—she insists on it whether it feels good to you or not. The ultimate mother who can’t let go, she presses herself on you, co-opts your plans, and plants herself in the center of your world, believing that she’s behaving lovingly. As you grow older and try to shape your own agenda, letting her know that you have needs and wishes of your own, particularly ones that exclude her, she rarely releases her grip without a fight.

  Like all unloving mothers, she puts herself first. Even if you have a full life of your own, she wants you to stay her little girl, joined to her at the hip. She holds out promise and praise that disappear when you prove to have a mind of your own. And she tries to mold you by making you feel guilty if you don’t go along with her wishes and needs.

  Trish: How Bonding Turns to Bondage

  Trish, a twenty-six-year-old teacher’s aide, called me because there had been so much tension in her family after the birth of her first child. I asked her what she thought was causing the strain.

  TRISH: “I had been thinking for some time that my mom needed to give me a little space, and Doug, my husband, had been complaining about the way she always wanted to do things with us, no matter what we had planned. I’m used to her—we’ve always been kind of inseparable, for better or worse. But after what happened when our baby Lily was born… . I hate to admit it, but he’s right—she’s out of control.”

  I asked Trish to give me an example.
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  TRISH: “I was in the delivery room. I only wanted Doug with me, and he told my parents they had to stay in the waiting area. My mother got very upset and said she belonged in there with me. Doug told her very politely but firmly that this wasn’t going to happen. There was a bell on the door to the delivery room, and to my horror my mother kept pushing it every two minutes. When a nurse opened the door she demanded to be let in. The nurse said I didn’t want anyone in there and my mother started crying. ‘I need to be in there with my girl,’ she kept saying. ‘My little girl needs me.’ The nurse closed the door, but Mom kept ringing the bell. My husband finally had to go and actually physically restrain her. She just couldn’t stand being away from me, which sounds like a good thing. But I didn’t want her there. I just wanted Doug. He’s really upset about what happened, my mom’s not speaking to me, and I feel guilty as hell.”

  The pressure, the tension, and the guilt were all familiar to Trish. Her mother, Janice, had been in nursing school when she got pregnant with Trish, and she dropped out to raise her. “Mom gave up everything for me,” said Trish, repeating the familiar family story. Disappointed with her marriage and with no career, Janice felt a deep void inside herself, Trish told me. But she still had her daughter. Trish became her companion, confidante, and reason for being.

  TRISH: “I remember when I was eight and we were riding the subway. We’d just come from a movie. She put her arm around me and said, ‘You’re absolutely my best friend. You’re so smart, such wonderful company—I’m so unhappy with your father.’ I was so proud, but part of me was really uncomfortable. When you’re eight, you don’t want to be Mom’s best friend. You want her and your father to be close, and you want her to have her own friends. You just want to be her little girl.”

  Trish told me that her mother’s marriage had always been troubled. Janice married the young man who got her pregnant, and they were never a good match. He started staying out late and having affairs soon after they were married, creating an atmosphere in which Janice needed to find nurturing somewhere else. And she turned to Trish for almost all of it. She could escape into the company of a little girl whose complete and uncritical affection was as close to unconditional love as she could get.

  So Janice enveloped her young daughter with what looked and felt like adoration. Here was her mother saying she’d rather be with her than anyone else—how could that be so bad? But even at eight Trish knew something was not right.

  A mother like Janice is devoted, not neglectful, when her daughter is young, though she may hover, determined to buffer her baby (and that’s how she’ll often refer to her child, whatever her age) from disappointments and difficulties. She’ll fight to get her child a good grade, or an invitation to a birthday party, or the status item everyone wants. None of this seems unloving. But it can prove to be exceedingly so as soon as a daughter tries to break away, explore, and express her own desires. That’s when so much of what the mother believes is closeness, love, and bonding reveals itself to be an elaborate form of bondage.

  In a healthy relationship, the bond between a mother and her daughter is meant to be a flexible, malleable connection that can withstand distance, conflict, and differences—differences of opinion, feelings, needs, desires. Ideally when a child first tests that bond by trying out the word “no!” around the “terrible twos,” she discovers that even when she asserts herself and defies her mother, the love between them doesn’t disappear. It’s safe to be her own person, and she can trust the bond with her mother will be there.

  As the child grows, she takes bigger steps into the world on her own, falls, and makes mistakes. And, if she’s lucky, her mother is the safe harbor she can return to, even after doing something foolish or rebellious. This is especially true during the teen years, when a daughter is figuring out who she is, testing limits, learning what those alien creatures called boys are like, and deciding what kind of woman she’d like to become. A loving mother-daughter relationship may be frayed, rocky, and tumultuous at times, but there’s a steady undercurrent of acceptance, which helps give daughters the courage to grow, evolve, and become separate individuals.

  That’s not what enmeshed mothers have in mind. Many of them have made motherhood not only their entire definition of themselves and their value, but also a way to soothe their own very common fear of abandonment. Some may have partners, careers, and friends of their own, but what eclipses all of that is their role as the mother of a dependent child who needs them, and even feels like the missing piece that completes them. The “closeness” they want is so all-encompassing that a daughter, as the familiar phrase puts it so well, often doesn’t know where she stops and her mother begins.

  Enmeshers place the burden of their happiness on you, and instead of teaching you to build a life of your own, they snap on the emotional handcuffs, and never let you go.

  Separation Is Not Allowed

  Overly enmeshed mothers see the very normal and necessary process of separation as a loss and a betrayal, and they work hard to pull you back in anytime you try to grow up, pull away, or leave.

  Natural transitions, like a daughter’s move from home to college, frequently trigger what feels like the empty nest syndrome on steroids. When Trish graduated from high school—and long before that—Janice had many options for a better life. She could have gone back to school and picked up her vocation or sought out marriage counseling for her husband and herself. Nothing was holding her back. But by this time, she was so used to reaching for her daughter to fill every bit of her emptiness, that’s where she continued to put her energy:

  TRISH: “It was so embarrassing when I went away to school. She made a federal case out of the fact that I wanted to go to a school in another state, and one of the reasons she was willing to stop fighting me on it was that her sister lived in my college town, so Mom could use visiting her sister as an excuse to check up on me. Mom had the irritating habit of just ‘dropping by’ to see me, and calling at all hours. I’d come in late and the phone would be ringing. It was always her, wanting the play-by-play of my most recent date. Thank God there were no cell phones then. Now Mom’s cell is like her drug—she calls me constantly, she texts, she wants to Skype, especially now with the baby. It’s horrible to say, but I feel like she’s in my pocket, spying on me. Mom GPS—she always knows where I am.”

  Mothers like Trish’s may constantly repeat, “I’m so glad we can share this experience” and “I’m so glad I can be there for you,” but they rarely ask if their presence is welcome. They frame their neediness and the claustrophobic world they’ve engineered for the two of you as a “special gift” that other daughters would love to have.

  And daughters learn that it’s their job to keep their mothers happy by sticking close and keeping Mom at the center of their lives.

  Stacy: Caught In the Strings

  Attached to a Mother’s Gifts

  As frustrating as it can be to be smothered in this way, there are times when enmeshment can feel like love, at least for the moment. Suddenly, just when you need it most, the overly enmeshed mother may offer money, resources, or experiences—and that can seem like a godsend.

  But there’s usually a catch.

  Her gifts, some quite generous, inevitably create a sense not only of obligation to her but also a dependency that can be crippling. By keeping you from having to stand on your own two feet, she makes herself indispensable. That can be her license to move in and take over, sometimes almost literally.

  Stacy, an athletic thirty-seven-year-old who was newly married to the owner of a small construction company and working in his office to help out, came to see me because her husband had given her an ultimatum about her mother Beverly’s constant invasion of their lives. Stacy was confused, she said, because her mother had been a great help to them. Their construction business was struggling in the weak economy, and they needed stability, especially for their two children, Stacy’s eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter from a previous marria
ge. The last thing she needed was friction with her husband.

  STACY: “He actually told me I had to make a choice between my mother and him—he said that he didn’t expect to be married to two women! He said he loved me deeply and he didn’t want to break up the marriage, but that she was driving him crazy and he can’t stand how I almost disappear and get so timid when she’s around. He told me he can’t stand how angry and resentful he feels. I love both of them, but I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place.”

  I asked Stacy to tell me how things got to this crisis point.

  STACY: “I guess it came to a head when my mother bought the house next door to hers—she made a lot of money as a real estate broker—and offered to rent it out to us at a very low price. Well, here we are just starting out together and we’re struggling because the income from Brent’s company and my job is barely meeting our monthly expenses, and my mother buys this really nice house that we can rent for practically nothing. So I thought, ‘Great!’ She sweetened the pot by saying, ‘I can help with the cooking and be there when the kids get home from school and I can save you tons of money.’ It seemed like a terrific idea at the time. Plus she would be a lot less lonely with all of us so close—she and my dad finally broke up a few years ago, and my brothers have lived out of state for years, so the kids and Brent and I are the only family she has. I could tell she was restless after she retired… . It seemed like such a win-win… . She’d be happy, we’d get a break we really needed. Brent was pretty resistant to the idea of having her right next door, but I pleaded so much he finally gave in.”

  Although it’s rarely a terrific idea for two generations to live on top of each other like that, it would have had a chance of working out, at least temporarily, if Beverly had been respectful of the couple’s privacy and need for alone time. But she did just the opposite.