Estranged From Your Mother, and Now From Your Daughter

A woman who stopped speaking to her mother at twenty-six usually spends the next thirty years making sure her children never have a reason to do the same. She doesn't hit them or scream at them over spilled milk, and she goes to every recital and parent-teacher conference her own mother skipped. Then her daughter texts at thirty-one that she needs some time and will reach out when she's ready, and she doesn't. Now the woman isn't speaking to her mother or her daughter, and the first question she asks herself is whether she turned out like her mother after all.

She knows what the decision looks like to the daughter making it, because she made it herself. She remembers deciding not to pick up the phone for the third Sunday in a row, and how many months she'd been thinking about it before she did. She also remembers what her mother tried afterward, the birthday cards with a twenty in them and the messages passed along through an aunt. There was a voicemail that opened with how sick her mother had been, and none of it brought her back. Most of what she's tempted to do now is what her mother did then, and she knows how it went over.

The relatives who stayed in touch with her mother have opinions, sooner or later a cousin or an aunt tells her that now she knows how her mother felt. Her mother might hear about it and send word through the same aunt that she isn't surprised. The people a woman would usually call when her daughter stops speaking to her are her own mother and sisters, and she stopped talking to them years ago. Her husband and her friends can listen, but most of them have never been estranged from anyone. They don't know what to say when it's happened to her twice.

She's been comparing her daughter's childhood to her own since the day the baby came home from the hospital. Measured against a mother who slapped her for crying, she did very well, and she's right about that. Her daughter isn't measuring against the grandmother, though, because she never lived with her. She's comparing the childhood she had to the one she needed and to what she saw in her friends' families. A mother can be a great improvement on her own mother and still fall short of both.

She's also the one who showed her family that a grown woman can stop speaking to a parent and get through it. Her daughter watched her keep that decision for twenty years. There were holidays without grandparents, and a great-aunt's funeral her mother skipped so she wouldn't have to see her own mother there. None of it makes either woman's decision wrong. It does mean the daughter grew up knowing an adult could choose whether to keep calling her mother, because she saw her own mother choose. Whatever her reasons are, she never had to work out on her own that leaving was possible.

Women who cut off a parent are often so set on not repeating their own childhoods that they go too far the other way. A woman whose mother was cold can make her daughter her best friend, telling her about the divorce lawyer at twelve and calling her every night in college to talk about her own loneliness, since she has no mother of her own to call instead. The daughter grows up knowing her mother's moods better than her own, by thirty she can't take one more of those calls. A woman whose father threw things during arguments might make sure nobody in her family ever raises their voice, and then nobody learns how to have a fight and make up afterward. The first real fight with her daughter, at twenty-eight, over a wedding guest list or how she talks about her son-in-law, never gets resolved, and the daughter does what she watched her mother do with her grandmother.

A woman whose father set every rule in the family, who read her diary and took half her paycheck from the grocery store at sixteen, sometimes raises her daughter with almost none. There's no curfew and no chores, and the answer to most requests is yes, including the car at seventeen and the move back home at twenty-five with no rent. Then at thirty her daughter asks her to cosign a $32,000 car loan, and she says no. It's the first time she's turned her daughter down on anything that involved money. Her daughter hears her mother suddenly trying to run her life, because nothing in her childhood looked like a limit, and the mother hears her daughter calling her controlling, after thirty years of making sure nobody could.

Say her daughter asks her to stop commenting on her weight at dinner. A mother who was criticized constantly as a girl hears her own mother calling her a failure instead of a request about dinner conversation, and she either cries or spends twenty minutes explaining what she meant. Her daughter wanted the comments to stop. What she got was her mother's childhood again and the job of comforting her about it, and after enough of those dinners she stops bringing anything up and then stops coming.

She also expects, without ever saying so, to be thanked for what her children were spared. She worked double shifts so her daughter could finish college without loans and babysat three days a week for two years so her daughter could go back to work. She mentions what her own mother never did for her often enough that her daughter can recite it. Her daughter can't feel grateful for missing a slap she never got, since to her that was a normal childhood, and once the visits start to feel like making up for a grandmother she barely knows, she resents them.

If you're estranged from your mother and now from your daughter, you're the only one asking whether you were as bad as your mother. You can have been far better than her and still have done things your daughter couldn't live with. You know better than most mothers what didn't work on you, the cards and the messages through relatives and the calls about her health, and none of it is likely to work on your daughter either. If she ever tells you what hurt, ask what she meant before you explain what you went through, even though what you went through was real and was worse. When she says something you did at dinner bothered her, tell her you'll stop, and then stop.

From the book

Was I Really That Bad?

A mother estranged from both her mother and her daughter usually ends up asking whether she was as bad as her own mother, and she asks it alone, since the people she'd normally call are the ones she stopped speaking to. Was I Really That Bad? is written for her, and it treats what she went through as real while still asking her to hear what her daughter says about her own childhood.

Read about the book