But she's your mother! Ugh 🙄

I'm a 59-year-old Gen X mom who grew up with a present but absent mother, and can we talk about something that absolutely blows my mind? First off, let me paint the picture of my mom and so many other Gen Xers and their moms. And you know, if you think that this wasn't a trend, just look in the comments of how many times I post about this kind of stuff, and you will see people saying, "Did we grow up in the same house?" Now it wasn't everybody, but it definitely was a thing. I had a stay-at-home mom, not one of those moms that was busting her ass hard in multiple jobs to put food on the table. A stay-at-home mom with the time and the means. And she never played with me, never read books to me, never taught me anything. And, well, I take that back. One time she tried to teach me how to tie my shoes and gave up after like two attempts. And I remember sitting in my room, and I had those, you know, those white, black and white saddle shoes, you know the ones, and I just sat there all day by myself, four years old, just trying until I could get it. And you know, I just learned early on that nobody is coming to save you. And did she celebrate when I finally got my, you know, achievement with the tied shoes? Nope. You know, got my period for the first time. She never looked up from her romance novel. Just yelled, "Pads are under the sink, you'll figure it out." And those were the ones with the straps. I mean, I'm old enough to have had those. There was never a celebration of any kind of milestone or any kind of emotional attunement for even the smallest thing. Cry and she'd say, "I'll give you something to cry about." Literally left on my own to figure all things out. And yes, I learned independence. It's definitely a skill that I acquired, you know, out of necessity, but at what cost? It certainly has impacted my adult life. You know, why I stayed with relationships for too long? Hyper independence. Or, like I don't need anybody, or people pleasing, or over functioning. Difficulty identifying or expressing my own needs. That's a big one. Feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions. Guilt when establishing boundaries, um, allowing people with no emotional availability to dictate my mood. So let me ask you, why is it that when you grow up with an emotionally unavailable parent, everybody expects you to do all the work to maintain the relationship? People say, "When was the last time you called your mother?" You know, I don't know, Karen, when is the last time she called a behavioral therapist? Because, damn, I've been doing the work. I've spent years unpacking the emotional neglect, recognizing the patterns, healing the damage, learning boundaries, and making for damn sure I didn't pass that shit down to my daughter. And what did, what did she do? Here's something that nobody likes to talk about in the sunlight. Some of those parents are the exact same emotionally immature people that they were when we were children, except now they're elderly, and suddenly there's this expectation that we're supposed to become their emotional support system, their caregiver, their therapist, and their punching bag. You know, I didn't apply for all those positions. No. And why is nobody, and I mean nobody, asking them what they've done to repair the relationship? Why isn't anybody up in their business? You just never hear about that. Have we said to them, "Have you apologized to your daughter? Have you acknowledged the harm that you've caused? Have you done any work on yourself?" Nope. Instead, everybody's over here interviewing the adult child like we're the ones who created the problem. I mean, I was the child in that relationship. I did not create the dysfunction. I just inherited the bill. I have spent my entire adult life paying it off, breaking the cycle. I have moved on, but society and someone in the comments inevitably will prove it by saying something like, "But she's your mother," or "I wanna set an example for my child and continue to take care of her," you know, to be the good example. But I'm sorry, but I do not expect my child to take that level of trauma from me. She owes me nothing, and I certainly don't wanna teach her to take that level of toxicity from family, let alone anybody else. So, no, I don't believe breaking generational cycles means spending the rest of my life tolerating the very behaviour that I have worked so hard to heal from. You know, breaking the cycle doesn't mean I become the parent that my mother never was to me. It means I get to stop participating in the dysfunction. For some, you know, that might mean setting really strong boundaries, and for others, the wound may be so damn deep that it means becoming estranged from your mother is the only thing that you can do to stay mentally healthy. And if that makes some people feel uncomfortable, well, maybe they should talk to their therapist about that.