A mother whose adult child has gone no contact usually finds out from her phone, because that’s where it shows up first. Her texts go unanswered for months, and her calls ring once and go to voicemail. The birthday card she mailed comes back stamped return to sender, unopened. A lot of women in that position are furious, and most of them don’t say so to anyone, because there isn’t anybody they can say it to who won’t take it as proof that they did something to deserve it.
The internet is full of writing for the adult child who left, about boundaries and breaking cycles and how much better life gets after cutting contact. Very little of it is written for the mother, and what there is tells her to respect the decision and work on herself. She might do both eventually, but for the first year or two a lot of mothers are just angry.
Most of the angriest mothers raised their children differently than they were raised, and they did it on purpose. They grew up eating what was put on the table and speaking when they were spoken to, and they decided early that their own children would get listened to. Then they spent twenty years on it, paying for braces and travel-team fees and part of a college degree, driving to practices on weeknights, and pulling from their own savings when a child needed a deposit on an apartment. Somewhere along the way they came to expect that if there was ever trouble, a grown child who was upset with them would at least call and say so.
None of their children agreed to that, and most mothers know it, and knowing it doesn’t help. The money and the driving and the years were real, and now their child acts as if none of it happened. The adult child usually remembers the same years differently, and her reasons for leaving have little to do with what was paid for.
A lot of the anger is about the words. A mother who remembers a normal, imperfect household hears it described back to her as abusive, or narcissistic, or toxic, words nobody was using when she was raising her children in the 1990s. If she asks what she did, she might be told she should already know. An apology for what she remembers can get turned down as not enough, or as the wrong apology. To her, it feels like the decision was made before anyone asked her anything.
It’s also true that a daughter describing her childhood in words her mother has never used is still describing something. The words came from a therapist or from reading she did on her own, and she went looking for them because something already felt wrong to her. A mother who decides the words are the problem has stopped listening to what they’re about. If she treats her child’s no as something the internet talked her into, she’s treating it as a mistake she can correct, and that’s usually the fastest way to make the no permanent.
The anger usually gets worse once there are grandchildren. A grandmother who hasn’t seen a grandson since he was three finds out about his birthdays from other relatives, and it’s hard for her to see that as anything but punishment. It can be punishment, an adult child keeping the grandchildren away to get her way on everything else. Or the adult child has decided her mother isn’t safe to leave alone with the children, for reasons the mother doesn’t agree with or doesn’t remember. The grandmother usually isn’t told which it is, so she can’t tell the two apart.
Anger is easier to get through a day with than grief is, and a lot of mothers know that about themselves even while it’s happening. As long as she’s angry, she’s the one who was wronged, and she would rather feel that than the grief. If a coworker asks how her son’s doing, she makes something up, because the true answer makes her look like the problem. When she isn’t angry, even for an afternoon, she has to think about the fact that her child is alive and living somewhere she’s never been, and she isn’t allowed to know whether he’s healthy or whether he’s happy.
If you’re the mother in this, anything you write to your child while you’re this angry is going to sound angry to her, whatever else you put in it. A letter that lists the braces and the tuition reads to her as a list of what you think she should be grateful for. A letter that says you’ll be waiting whenever she’s ready to stop using therapy language tells her you think the language was the problem. Write it if you need to, and wait to send anything until you can write a letter that doesn’t list what you did for her.
From the book
Was I Really That Bad?
Most mothers in this position want to know what they did, and they want to hear it from someone who isn't going to tell them they should already know. Was I Really That Bad? is written for the mother whose adult child stopped calling, and it goes through what her child might be describing alongside what she remembers, so she has something to work with while she's still too angry to send anything.
Read about the book