#anyway i'm so excited to go to my mom's house for thanksgiving! (lying)
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briar--rising ยท 1 month ago
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Long post about grief and mothers and probably other stuff, idk
Something that I've been trying to process lately is a certain almost loss of my mom. I mean, she's still around, she hasn't died, and I haven't and won't cut contact. But I don't need to cut external contact, because I've cut off our relationship internally, for the most part. And it's been devastating.
For all that our relationship was a toxic abusive enmeshed disaster, I still loved her desperately, and she was still my mom. But as I've been working on recovering I've needed to separate myself from her, become my own person with boundaries, and because of who she is I can't do that and still have a mother left. She can't act maternally towards me without subsuming me, and I can't let her do that anymore. So I can't have a mom. When we talk these days mostly she honestly feels like some random woman who is vaguely intellectually connected to the mom I had in the past. She doesn't feel like a mother at all anymore, not even in the bad ways really. There's just...nothing there. It's not safe for there to be anything there.
I used to hold out hope that sometime in the distant future we'd be able to have an honest conversation about my childhood and our relationship, that she'd be able to hear my perspective and recognize me as an individual and have a healthier relationship with me. And I finally realized that that dream is impossible. It will never happen. She refuses to go back to therapy, she has no desire for introspection, every time I try to raise something she gaslights me, she feels too unsafe to risk vulnerability. It's just not going to happen. You can't buy oranges at the hardware store. I need to be a person, and because of her issues she can't be a mother to a separate person. And I've finally accepted that.
And I am left with such tremendous grief. I read a sentence earlier about someone calling their mom when they were upset in the middle of the night and thought, "I can't do that. I haven't been able to do that in years, and I never will again. I can't trust her with the truth of myself, with my vulnerabilities, with my feelings. She feels like a distant cousin, someone I can make small talk with at family events, not someone who raised me, who knows me, who I can share myself with. She will never be able to learn about the person I am becoming, and I will change more and more from the version of me in her head, and she will not see it. When I feel small and lonely and sad and sick and want a mom to take care of me, there is no one I can call. That does not exist any longer. I don't know that it ever truly did, but I used to have a facsimile of it, and now and forever more I won't have even that."
It is devastating, to realize and start accepting that I don't have a mom, not truly. It is excruciating. I didn't realize, when I started to become my own person and separate from her, that I would lose her like this. I feel in some ways like I didn't know what I was getting into when I started making certain types of progress towards healing, like I didn't give informed consent. I think that's been the hardest part. I was blindsided by this loss, didn't even realize it was happening until it was basically irreversible. I'd like to think that if I had known I would have made the same decisions, that healing and becoming my own person is worth this grief. But I didn't know I was making that choice, certainly not on a conscious level. And now it's done, and I can never go back.
I've been talking about this in therapy, the fact that I can never fully return to the state of person-less-ness I spent my childhood in. Even if I let myself become completely subsumed in someone else again, I would have memories of once being my own person. It would be different than the complete lack of selfhood and subjectivity I had as a child. And of course that's a good thing, of course I don't want to be only an object never a subject. But I didn't know what I'd be giving up, by doing this. I feel betrayed by my own healing. It hurts. It really, really hurts.
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