Who Gets to Be the Injured One

Ask an estranged mother what happened and she'll tell you what she gave up. Ask her daughter and she'll tell you what she went without. Both of them are describing the same family accurately, and neither one recognizes the other's description of it.

The mother's story usually starts early. She worked, she went without, she stayed in a marriage that cost her something, she put her own plans down and never picked them back up. None of it is invented. What she was told, and what nearly every woman handed this assignment was told, is that going without is the work itself, and the work gets you something in the end. Not money. Attention, deference, a daughter who calls on Sundays, a place at the center of a family she built by hand.

Longsuffering is a strange compliment. It praises duration rather than the woman, treats the suffering itself as correct, and puts the achievement in how long she absorbed it before stopping. The word almost never gets used on men, and when it does it means patience with a situation rather than a life spent taking on other people.

Endurance only counts if somebody sees it. The mother's had to be witnessed, and the daughter was the one assigned to witness it. A good portion of what women describe as their childhood job is exactly that, registering how hard it was for her, saying so out loud at the right moments, adjusting themselves in advance so she wouldn't have to take on one more thing.

Her brother grew up in the same house and was never handed the same job. He can call at Christmas and be a good son. A daughter who calls at Christmas and nothing else is neglectful, and she'll hear about it from relatives who have never once asked him why he doesn't visit. The demands on a mother come from all of her children. The obligation to meet them lands on the girls.

The daughter was useful early and useful reliably. She could tell what kind of evening it would be from the sound of the front door, translated between people who wouldn't speak to each other directly, made herself easy to have around, and got told she was mature for her age by adults who were relieved rather than concerned. She was promised something too, though nobody put it in words. It was in the assumption that being good gets you loved eventually, once things settle down.

So two women end up in the same argument, each certain she gave more than she got, each right about her own life. The mother went without for thirty years. The daughter spent her childhood making sure the going-without never got heavier. Neither of them is lying. Neither one can give the other what she's asking for, because whoever decided the arrangement would work this way was never in the family.

None of which makes the two positions equal. A mother handed an impossible assignment still had authority over a child who had none, and describing where a behavior came from does not shrink what it did. A daughter who ends contact is rarely confused about her mother's intentions. She left because it kept happening, not because she misunderstood why.

There's a second mother in this, and she comes up far less often. Some women look at the longsuffering job and decline it, usually late, once the children are grown and the job has turned into something else. It isn't bedtimes anymore. It's three days a week of childcare that got arranged around her without anyone asking first, a cosigned loan on her son's car that she'll be paying if it goes bad, a phone line that never came off the family plan, rent covered again out of a month she'd set aside for herself. She says no. She books the trip she's been putting off for eleven years, and she goes.

The response is immediate and it is not gratitude. She gets called cold, selfish, difficult, a bad mother, and it comes from her sons and her daughters alike, and from women who took the assignment and resent her for declining it. Nobody looks at the actual money. Somebody spent their own on a concert and can't make rent, and the one behaving unreasonably is the woman with savings who wants to see Portugal. Sometimes the children stop calling over it. A son who does it is disappointed in her. A daughter who does it is unnatural, and she knows the difference before she picks up the phone. Either way the mother ends up estranged for refusing the exact role the first mother is grieving.

Estranged mothers grieve, and the grief gets a different reception than other losses do. The assumption is that she must have done something, so people are sympathetic and suspicious at the same time. Most of them work this out quickly and stop volunteering it. She says she has a daughter and then stops there.

The problem isn't which of them gave more. Both women were taught that love is something you earn by being useful and collect afterward, once you've done enough, and under those terms nobody is ever finished. It explains why these conversations go nowhere. The mother lists thirty years, the daughter lists eighteen, and proving a case is a poor way to describe what happened between two people who lived in the same house.

A woman can be valued for what she produces. She cannot be loved for it. Most of them take being valued anyway, because the alternative is deciding the whole arrangement was for nothing.

Nothing here reconciles anybody. A daughter can understand exactly what shaped her mother and still not want her in her life, and understanding has never obligated anyone to stay. Both women can be right about their own lives without either one being required to answer for the other's. The daughter isn't responsible for making up what her mother lost. The mother isn't required to produce a confession she may not be capable of making. Stop working out who gave more and what's left is two women handed the same instructions who did different things with them. Nobody else in the family was ever asked for any of it. It's part of why the argument stays between the two of them.