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

by Forward, Susan

  JODY: “There’s a drawer full of unpaid bills in the kitchen, and I think I saw a warning that the electricity was going to be turned off. When she calls, she makes her voice sound all depressed, expecting me to run right over. One of the first things she said when I told her I was getting my master’s in counseling was, ‘Oh good! Now you can fix me!’

  “Well, guess what? I’ve finally had enough. I’ve tried everything I can think of to live my life and still remain in contact with her and it doesn’t work. She can’t stop saying hurtful things. She won’t stop drinking. What I want now more than anything is to live my own life, for her to leave me alone. She can do whatever she wants—stay in her room, drink, get depressed. I don’t care! I just want her out of my life… . But … how can I just abandon her? She’ll die, and then how can I handle the guilt?”

  Jody stared into her lap, looking almost physically deflated.

  SUSAN: “You have a big responsibility, Jody—to yourself. You’ve done everything you can for your mother, and from what I can see, she will not do anything for herself.”

  I asked Jody if she’d talked to her mother about getting help—AA or working with an addiction specialist.

  JODY: “Oh, according to her she’s ‘not an alcoholic.’ She somehow still has her job, she’s not out on the street yet, and I guess that means she doesn’t have a drinking problem. It’s always everybody else’s fault. She drinks because of me. Right.”

  Alcoholics like Margaret typically project the blame for their drinking onto whatever seems convenient, I told Jody—the people who are closest to them, world events, the weather. They need just the slightest excuse.

  JODY: “I keep telling myself all that, Susan, and they tell me that in Al-Anon. But even when I’m the most furious with her, I feel like she’s my … my child. And how do I abandon my child?”

  Even with all the clarity that they may get from their adult perspective, many daughters have tremendous ambivalence about breaking off from a mother who has essentially morphed into a helpless and needy child. Their feeling of obligation to her is so ancient and unquestioned that it can pierce their anger and their healthy self-protective urges in an instant. Breaking away from all that requires unlearning layers of old responses and setting priorities that have nothing to do with getting sucked into your mother’s disasters and depression.

  For Jody, the obvious priority was her baby, a real child who needed her and who was actually helpless and dependent. I knew how committed she was to being a strong and healthy mother, and how much she wanted to be there for her daughter in a way that her mother couldn’t be there for her. But it takes a lot of physical and emotional energy to be a good mother, and emotional energy supplies aren’t infinite. If you have children, you can’t keep dissipating your emotional resources by going back to rescue your mother. You have a responsibility to yourself, your partner if you have one, and to the children. Your mother has to take responsibility for herself.

  When addiction is in the picture, the one certainty is that the addict’s substance of choice will take increasing amounts of her attention and resources, whether the “substance” is alcohol, prescription or illegal drugs, food, gambling, or sex. Pulling away from her is the only way to transform the effects her condition has had on you—and that requires disengaging from the behaviors you’ve been taught: the secret-keeping, the rescuing, the hypervigilance. You’ll have to stop doing the kinds of things you take for granted, as Jody did, counting how many glasses of wine your mother has been drinking, for instance, instead of playing with your baby. It’s hard work, but it’s the only way to keep from passing all the pain of your childhood on to a new generation—or continuing to carry it inside.

  You Lost Your Childhood—and It Still Hurts

  A daughter like Jody or Allison does her best to make her life seem and feel “normal” when she’s young, covering up the evidence of her mother’s depression, drinking, drug abuse, or neglect. She cares for her siblings. She cooks, she cleans. If her mother’s husband or boyfriend turns violent, she’s the one who puts the antibacterial cream on her mother’s wounds or calls the police. She carries a horrendously heavy emotional load.

  If you are a woman who grew up with a mother who abdicated her maternal role, you may have taken a great deal of satisfaction from being needed. Some of that behavior looks noble on the surface, but you’ve paid dearly for it. You got cheated out of a childhood. You have a right to be both sad and angry about that.

  Chapter 6

  Mothers Who Neglect,

  Betray, and Batter

  “You’re always causing trouble.”

  Just like sea turtles who deposit their eggs in the sand and then go back to the sea, some mothers disappear emotionally almost as soon as they’ve given birth to their daughters. Unavailable, distant, and cold, they may be physically present, but they look right through their little girls, preoccupied with their own needs.

  Self-centeredness is common to all the mothers we’ve seen, but the mothers at this end of the continuum are so disturbed that they neglect their daughters’ basic emotional needs, and sometimes their physical ones. So incapable of caring are they that they put the lie to the assumption that bonding is an intrinsic part of motherhood. Women like this treat their daughters like objects, resenting them, blaming them for life’s dissatisfactions, withholding even the smallest kindness, and, in the worst cases, failing to protect them from predators and abusers—or becoming abusers themselves.

  These mothers who emotionally abandon, betray, and batter are mothers in name only. And they leave in their wake daughters who are fearful, angry, ravenous for affection, and forever struggling to find their own way.

  Emily: The Invisible Daughter

  Emily, a thirty-six-year-old comptroller for an architectural firm, contacted me for help with her two-year relationship. At her job, she felt competent and respected, she told me, but her closeness with Josh, who had a small importing business, seemed to be slipping away.

  EMILY: “I have good friends, I’m making good money. But I’m so miserable at home. I thought Josh was sexy and exciting when we got together, and I thought he wanted kids. I really want a baby, and I can hear the clock ticking. But everything went bad between us. Josh keeps everything to himself, and he’s so withdrawn—we’re living together but I feel so alone. He’s always on the computer, and even when we go out, he says so little, retreats into his phone. He leaves me starved for love. The sick thing is that it feels so familiar it’s almost comfortable.”

  I asked Emily why this was familiar to her.

  EMILY: “This is so hard to say, but my mom was like that—so distant and cold. I … didn’t feel like she wanted me around.”

  The loneliness and distance she felt with Josh, she told me, was very much like what she remembered from being a child.

  EMILY: “My mother had me, but she never hugged me or told me she loved me. When she did talk to me, it was to tell me what I had done wrong and what a burden I was to her. Once she even said, ‘I wish you’d never been born.’ ”

  SUSAN: “Oh, Emily. I’m so sorry that happened to you. ‘I wish you’d never been born’ is the cruelest and most wounding thing a mother could say to a child.”

  Emily teared up. “Thank you,” she said softly. “That’s the first time anyone’s ever really heard me.”

  We sat quietly for a moment, and then I asked Emily if she got any affection from her father.

  EMILY: “My father was out of it most of the time. He worked really long hours. Looking back, I think he did everything he could to avoid her. So I never got any guidance, no teaching, no love or support. Why did they even have me if they didn’t want me?”

  Emily believed she had to be the only person rejected so dramatically by her mother, but I reassured her that sadly, it’s a story I’ve heard all too often. Many daughters have told me they’ve been ignored, made to feel invisible and unwanted by mothers who starved them of attention, touch, warmth, and su
pport.

  Mothers like Emily’s look at their young daughters seeing only “mess” or “bother” or a disruption of the fantasies and plans they had for themselves. In their preferred vision of life, they’re unencumbered by a child’s needs. And to them, the sweet face of their little girl—an innocent being who loves them unconditionally—is scarcely visible.

  We look at these mothers and wonder: How can they be so untouched, so unmoved, so callous toward a helpless, hapless child who is completely dependent on them for emotional sustenance that is as essential and life-giving as milk?

  What creates these situations? The reasons are many and varied. We have to assume that a mother who is so cold and uncaring must have been severely traumatized herself. She may have been rejected, or grown up in a loveless household and never learned even the rudimentary aspects of tenderness, empathy, or giving. That kind of trauma doesn’t go away by itself.

  When these women become adults, they often get caught up in the social pressure to have children. Some give in to a husband’s desire to have a baby when it’s not really what they want themselves. Or they unwittingly become pregnant and feel compelled by their moral or religious beliefs to become mothers, despite their own misgivings. Then, when the baby arrives, they suddenly have to face the reality that having a baby dramatically changes a woman’s life, demanding attention she may not know how to give.

  A woman like Emily’s mother almost certainly was a stranger to love. Without a spark of love to soften her fears and frustrations as she navigates the new world of motherhood, such a woman fills with anger, and her daughter becomes the scapegoat for her discontent, boredom, or sense of helplessness about her life. She wants that child out of her sight.

  The Scars of Feeling Unwanted

  The kind of emotional abandonment that Emily experienced may seem far less dramatic than, say, a mother leaving a baby on a church doorstep or driving off in the middle of the night for a new life with another man, but it’s every bit as confusing, disorienting, and scarring.

  EMILY: “I didn’t get to feel safe or be a child. I wasn’t given any safety net. No teaching, no instructions, no structure, no love or support in any area. I was so ill equipped to handle life. I didn’t know how to do basic things. I could never count on my mom for anything. She never made me feel like I was a daughter. I never felt like I was a treasure to her. I was just something she had to deal with when it suited her.

  “I felt so abandoned. When I got my first period I didn’t know what was happening and I went to my mother. Her response was, ‘Handle it yourself.’ ”

  Emily decided early that negative attention was better than no attention.

  EMILY: “At least when my mother had to come to school because I was caught cheating on a test or kissing a boy in the hall, I could pretend she cared about me. I wound up getting into a lot of trouble, but if I wasn’t in trouble I was invisible.”

  Invisible. It’s a word I’ve heard so often from daughters like Emily. Her mother essentially erased her, and she had such a hunger for love that she’d do anything to get it. She never learned that she could be loved for herself.

  EMILY: “I made bad choices with men. I would give up my money, my success, my plans—anything—to get someone to love me or want to be with me. I longed for people to take care of me, and it never worked out right. They all turn out like Josh—so great at the beginning and then they wind up pulling away, if they were ever really there.” (She began to cry softly.)

  “I just don’t feel I’m good enough for a good relationship or a good guy. Sometimes I wonder what I’d be like if only I’d had a normal mother who actually gave a damn about me.”

  SUSAN: “Emily, I want to help you move ahead, and to do that, you can’t stay stuck in ‘if only,’ because ‘if onlys’ keep you trapped in longing and fantasy and wishful thinking.”

  I told her that we’d work on two tracks, exploring both her relationship, which was the current crisis, and her childhood. She could learn new ways of being and feeling and becoming visible, whether she stayed with Josh or not.

  The Mother Who Fails to Protect

  Just as a lioness will battle to the death any creature that threatens her cubs, a loving mother must do no less. Of all the responsibilities that a mother must fulfill if her daughter is to thrive, perhaps the greatest is protection. A mother who knowingly fails to protect her daughter from harm or from physical or sexual abuse at the hands of a father, stepfather, or anyone else is guilty of aiding and abetting the perpetrator. Emotional abandonment takes on traumatic and dangerous facets when she betrays her daughter by standing by and allowing physical harm to befall her.

  Fearful, passive, and destructively self-serving, some mothers will permit their daughters to be pummeled or sexually molested rather than confront the abuser and take the risk of being injured or abandoned themselves. They will do anything to hold on to their partners, no matter how cruel or violent, ignoring their daughters’ screams and pleas, and even rationalizing that they’re doing the right thing by not getting involved. They look away and silently let the harm continue, leaving their daughters feeling fearful, suspicious, and full of guilt, believing they’ve brought all this pain on themselves.

  Kim: Facing Old Ghosts

  Kim is a striking, auburn-haired woman of forty-two who writes for women’s magazines. She told me her relationship with her daughter, Melissa, who was sixteen, was starting to be full of friction and tension. Kim and Melissa had been very close, but once Melissa started the normal process of pulling away and preferring to spend more time with her friends, Kim had become preoccupied with worry. Melissa was popular with her friends and a good student, and Kim told me she wanted to be sure things stayed that way.

  KIM: “She’s complaining and complaining that I don’t trust her, but all I’m doing is setting limits so things don’t get out of control. She has a nine P.M. curfew, I have her check in from wherever she is, and of course, no dating or overnights. That’s a recipe for trouble.”

  I told Kim that I didn’t understand what she was so worried about. Melissa had good grades and seemed to be doing well.

  KIM: “That’s right. But I know what happens when you don’t keep a close eye on kids this age. They can spin out of control in a second.”

  Kim seemed to be creating negative expectations of Melissa out of whole cloth, and I wasn’t surprised that a sixteen-year-old would be upset about living with such binding restrictions. She couldn’t even go out to an evening movie and stay to the end if she had to be home by nine. But Kim insisted that her daughter needed her protection.

  KIM: “You know how bad it is out there and how easy it is for kids to get in trouble. I wish to hell that my mother had cared about me as much as I care about Melissa. There would’ve been a lot less turmoil in my life.”

  I asked Kim to give some careful thought to whether her anxiety about her daughter might be connected to issues from her own life. Were there some old ghosts dancing around?

  She thought for a long moment.

  KIM: “I guess I’ve always been worried that I would not be a good enough mother. I know that talking about this is long overdue… . My childhood was so awful, and I thought, ‘It’s over and done with—I have a good life now. I can just grit my teeth and go on.’ But I’ve got so much buried garbage from the past.”

  Kim’s eyes filled with tears. I assured her that once we dealt with “the garbage” head-on, it wouldn’t have so much power over her. “What was going on in your house when you were a kid?” I asked.

  KIM: “The only person I’ve ever trusted enough to tell about this is my husband… . My childhood was a nightmare. My father was a bully who had fits of crazy rage. He would beat me and throw me against the wall regularly. And my mother just stood by as a silent witness. She didn’t do a thing! She allowed him to treat her like shit, and she allowed him to treat me the same way. I had to pay the price so she could have a husband and the facade of a family. All she cared abou
t was what everyone would think.”

  In an abusive marriage, the mother becomes a terrified child—far more concerned with defending herself against physical or emotional violence than she is about keeping her daughter safe. She hides—sometimes using her child as a kind of shield to take the brunt of the abuser’s treatment—instead of taking the necessary steps to get the abuser out of the house.

  KIM: “I wanted so much for her to protect me and care for me. But she watched everything and then acted as if she was blind.”

  Kim became the sacrificial lamb while her mother lived in a constant state of denial. In such situations, truth becomes the enemy because it is a threat to maintaining the unhealthy balance of a destructive family. If these mothers were to face the truth, they might have to do something about it—call the police or a child abuse agency. But they’re too frightened to even consider that. So they preach the value of silence and compliance and try to stay out of the way.

  KIM: “My dad … was crazy. He beat me with a belt, yelled at me, punished me. I couldn’t do anything right. Every day in that house was hell. I felt like I was drowning … there was never enough air. From the time I was five or six, I knew rage, hate, anger, and white-hot fear better than anyone should ever know it. I wanted my father to die … and I hated him so much I wished … I wished I could kill him. What child should ever have to feel like that?

  “And my mother! I know she heard me scream, heard the belt hitting my skin. I know she heard the anguish when I cried for help… . And she never once protected me. I was her little girl and she never… .” (She sobbed quietly for a while, then wiped away the tears.)

  “You know what I could never understand? Why we couldn’t go live with my grandmother. She lived in a big house, and I always counted the extra beds and wondered why we couldn’t stay with her. We had a place to go, but my mom kept me under the same roof with that monster. She let him abuse me and my little brother… . I told her we should all run away to Grandma’s. But she told me, ‘You know we can’t do that. Your dad would never let me get away. Don’t talk that way. It’s not going to happen. Don’t bring it up again.’ I felt helpless and scared all the time, and I had no one to talk to. I learned my voice didn’t matter—I guess that’s why I tried to express myself through writing. I felt so isolated. I didn’t know who I could trust.”