The Mother I Grieve Is Still Alive

I have a complicated relationship with the word mother.

I am one. I love being one. I have a stepmother who has shown me that motherhood can be something gentle and safe and steady. I have women in my life who have mothered pieces of me without ever being asked to. And then I have my biological mother, whom I have not spoken to in nearly eleven years and will never speak to again.

That last sentence tends to make people uncomfortable.

Estrangement makes people uncomfortable, especially when it is between a mother and daughter. There is almost always someone ready with the same handful of phrases. But she’s your mom. You only get one mother. Life is short. You’ll regret it when she’s gone. You need to forgive her.

I particularly hate, “You only have one mother.”

She only had one daughter. And yet here we are.

I didn't wake up one morning and casually decide I didn't want a mother anymore. Nobody cuts a parent out of her life for nearly eleven years because of one shitty Christmas or an argument that got out of hand. There was no single dramatic moment that erased an otherwise beautiful relationship. There were years of damage, followed by years of trying to survive that damage, followed by the realization that sometimes the only way to stop someone from hurting you is to stop giving them access to you.

Growing up with your mother as your first bully does something to you.

There were good memories. I think that is important to say because abusive relationships would be much easier to understand if every moment were horrible. There were laughs. There were normal days. There were things I loved about her. There were moments when she could be fun, and moments when I probably would have defended her to anyone who dared suggest she wasn't a good mother.

But when I look backward, the overwhelming majority of what remains isn't good.

I remember being a teenage girl already struggling with my body and hearing my mother brag about how she could drink milkshakes and never gain weight while criticizing mine. I remember being under a hundred pounds, curled up and painfully bloated because my periods weren't normal, and still being told I was fat. I learned incredibly young that my body was something other people were entitled to evaluate and that the number on a scale could determine how I was allowed to feel about myself.

Those lessons did damage I carried for years.

At the same time, I was growing up surrounded by purity culture. I was taught that opening my legs could make me worthless. Sexuality was shameful when it belonged to me, while the adults teaching those lessons did not necessarily live according to the same rules. My mother was having an affair with her boss while telling me what would happen to my value if I had sex.

It was confusing. It was hypocritical. And it taught me that perfection was expected from me even when the people demanding it weren't perfect themselves.

Then I found myself in an abusive relationship as a teenager.

I was fifteen years old with an older boyfriend who hurt me badly enough that I should have been able to run home and tell my mother everything. That is what we tell girls, right? If someone hurts you, tell an adult. Go home. Tell your mom. She'll protect you.

I couldn't.

I was afraid somehow his violence would become my fault. His family had money. There was pressure to keep quiet and let things happen that never should have been happening to a fifteen-year-old girl. I already knew what happened when I made mistakes or disappointed people. I knew shame far better than I knew safety.

So I learned how to survive things quietly. That lesson followed me for a very long time.

Home wasn't peaceful either. There was physical abuse. Verbal abuse. Things thrown. Dishes, cups, whatever happened to be within reach. Anger could become dangerous quickly, and when you grow up around that, you become very good at reading rooms. You learn tones of voice. Footsteps. Facial expressions. You learn how to make yourself smaller when you think smaller might be safer.

I became very good at being perfect. Or trying to be. Quiet. Obedient. Successful. Useful.

I didn't spend high school partying because I was busy figuring out how to get the fuck out.

College became my exit plan. I worked for scholarships. I took out loans in my own name. I worked because I had always worked. I found a school far enough away that I thought maybe I could finally figure out who I was when I wasn't constantly trying to manage somebody else's emotions.

Instead of excitement, leaving became another betrayal.

I was told I must hate her because I chose to go so far away. At one point, I received a phone call telling me that moving away was causing my parents' divorce. Imagine being a college-aged kid trying to build your own life while carrying that.

Then the divorce actually happened, and suddenly it wasn't enough to love both of my parents. There were sides. Choosing one meant proving loyalty by rejecting the other. To keep the peace with my mother, I was expected to erase my father's entire side of my family.

And for a while, I did versions of that.

That's one of the things people don't always understand when they look at an abusive relationship from the outside and ask why someone tolerated something. From inside it, the boundaries aren't obvious. Your normal has been built around the relationship. You don't wake up every morning thinking, I am being abused today. You think, That's just Mom.

That was my answer for years.

Friends noticed things. Other parents noticed things. My husband noticed things when we dated the first time. And then the second time, because apparently we needed a sequel before getting our shit together. Bosses and coworkers noticed. People would gently—or sometimes not so gently—tell me that something wasn't normal, and I would shrug.

Oh. That's just my mom.

As I got older, the relationship changed without actually becoming healthier. I stopped being treated only like a daughter and started being treated like a friend when friendship was convenient, and sometimes like a bankroll when money was needed. Anything I tried to do independently could be thrown back at me. Meanwhile, my younger brother could make enormous mistakes and somehow the world kept turning.

I made one? Catastrophe. So I became even better at trying not to make them.

Then I turned twenty-one and entered what I can only describe as the let's party together era, and that brought its own kind of weirdness.

It is weird when your mother hits on guys you grew up with. It is weird when she becomes jealous because a man your age asks for your number instead of hers. It is weird to have spent your adolescence being lectured about purity and modesty and then watch the person who gave those lectures dress in ways she would have criticized you for wearing—only to turn around and make fun of you for showing up in jeans and a cute top.

None of this is about what women should or shouldn't wear. If you want the tiny skirt, babe, wear the tiny skirt. God knows I am not the woman who is going to start policing somebody else's clothes.

It was the double standard. There was always one set of rules for me and another for her.

Then I got pregnant. I was an adult, and I was absolutely terrified to tell my own mother. That fact alone probably should have told me everything.

I was unmarried and scared and trying to figure out what my life was going to look like. I needed reassurance. Instead, I was told nobody would want a single mother, which was an especially interesting argument coming from a woman who was herself a single mother.

She made an abortion appointment for me. I didn't ask her to. She became angry when I didn't go. Then somehow the pregnancy she had wanted me to end became a baby she seemed to believe belonged to her.

She bought monogrammed clothes before I had chosen a name. She picked names herself and told me it didn't matter whether I liked them because that was going to be her baby's name.

Her baby. I was standing there pregnant thinking, I'm sorry, which one of us is currently growing this child?

And then the man who loved me came back into my life. My now-husband wanted me. He wanted the life that came with me. He loved me through circumstances that were messy and complicated and absolutely not the romantic little beginning anyone would put on Pinterest.

That created even more conflict.

My mother tried to get between us. Life became increasingly volatile, and by the time I gave birth, things had escalated enough that hospital staff came into our room and asked whether we were safe to go home. They offered resources.

I still remember what it felt like to sit there and realize strangers could see something I had spent years explaining away. That was one of the first times the thought landed differently.

This is not normal.

People had told me before. My husband had told me. Friends had told me. Other adults had told me.

But there was something about sitting in a hospital room after giving birth, vulnerable and exhausted, while professionals were asking questions about my safety that finally cracked through the wall of that's just Mom.

Coming home with our daughter should have been one of the happiest times of my life. Instead, everything became worse.

What should have been our experience as new parents became another conflict centered around my mother. Family members were pulled into it. I was freshly postpartum and crying while people called to scream at me and my husband. Packages sent by my father and stepmother were withheld. Boundaries we set for our baby were ignored or circumvented. Things we explicitly said no to were attempted behind our backs.

I was already struggling with postpartum depression. Breastfeeding wasn't working. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, hormonal, frightened, and responsible for this tiny person while the world around me felt increasingly hostile.

I was in one of the darkest periods of my life.

At one point, I tried to give my husband an out. He didn't take it. Thank God that man has never been particularly good at listening to me when I am being an idiot. He stayed. He loved me. He loved our daughter.

And when we finally started putting real distance and boundaries between my mother and our family, things didn't calm down. They became dangerous.

There was stalking. License plates were stolen. There were threats involving my daughter. There was an incident where my mother forced her way into my home and I had to call the police while armed because I was terrified of what could happen.

There is something deeply wrong about reaching a point where you are afraid enough of your own mother that your brain is calculating how to protect yourself from her inside your own home.

My husband lost his job because of the fallout. The stalking continued. Smear campaigns followed. People I thought I could trust became ways for information to get back to her. Friends and family members became intermediaries, whether intentionally or because they had been convinced they were helping.

I stopped wanting to leave my house. I stopped trusting people. I was terrified that she would hurt me and take my daughter. And when I tried to get legal protection, I encountered another version of the sentence I have hated ever since: Well, she's still your mom.

As though motherhood itself made what was happening less frightening. As though the title granted permanent access. As though being someone's mother meant there was a level of behavior a daughter was simply expected to endure.

Eventually, law enforcement helped us create enough distance that life became quieter. And slowly, we built something outside of her.

I became an author. Which created another strange chapter in the story.

The woman who had told me writing was worthless, that I would never make money doing it, that I wasn't going to become anything with it, suddenly began talking online about how proud she was of her daughter once I started publishing.

That hurt in a way I don't think I can adequately explain.

She couldn't reach me directly because I had blocked her, so eventually messages appeared in other places. Reviews. Public comments. Variations of It's me, your mom. I miss you.

Even now, nearly eleven years later, I occasionally hear that she has asked someone about me or tried to send a message through another person.

Those are sometimes the moments when people tell me I should forgive. And forgiveness is complicated for me. Especially now that my faith is such an important part of my life.

I love Jesus. I know how much Christianity talks about forgiveness. I know the verses. I know what I am supposed to want my heart to be capable of.

But I also know what happened. I know what fear felt like. I know what it cost me to finally feel safe. I know how long it took to build a life where I wasn't constantly looking over my shoulder. So I wrestle with forgiveness.

Maybe I always will.

What I have slowly come to believe, though, is that forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.

Forgiveness does not have to mean handing someone the keys to the door they repeatedly broke through. It doesn't require pretending something wasn't abusive because naming it makes other people uncomfortable. It doesn't mean eliminating boundaries. It doesn't mean offering another opportunity to do the same damage.

And it certainly doesn't require me to put my children in a situation I believe is unsafe simply so someone else can feel better about a fractured family.

Maybe forgiveness, for me, will never look like a reunion. Maybe it will look like continuing to work toward a place where what she did doesn't control what I do next. Some days I am better at that than others.

Because the strange thing about having an estranged living parent is that grief doesn't behave normally.

There was no funeral. There is no grave. There isn't one clean moment when everyone acknowledges that something has been lost. The person is still alive. And you grieve anyway.

I don't think I grieve the relationship we actually had anymore. I grieve the mother I should have had. I grieve being fifteen and not having somewhere safe to run. I grieve being pregnant and terrified to tell the person who should have been one of the first people I called. I grieve the postpartum version of me who needed someone to say, Give me the baby. Take a shower. Sleep. I've got you. I grieve all the ordinary mother-daughter things I didn't realize I was missing until adulthood.

Nobody taught me makeup. I still can't French braid hair. I learned about periods and tampons from a friend's mother. There are ridiculous little things I am still learning in my thirties that sometimes make me stop and think, Was somebody supposed to teach me this?

Those are the moments that can hurt unexpectedly. Not the giant dramatic memories. A braid. A recipe. A question another woman casually says she called her mom to ask.

Sometimes grief sneaks in through something that small.

And then there is my stepmother. She didn't get me as a little girl. She didn't get the version of me before all of this. She got me at twenty-one. She got a young woman carrying anger and hurt and confusion from a nasty divorce and years of relationships she didn't yet know how to understand. She got silence. Defensiveness. Mistrust. She got someone who had learned that love could be conditional and information could become ammunition.

She could have decided I was too much work. She didn't. She just kept showing up. Not loudly. Not possessively. Not demanding a title she hadn't earned. She loved my father. She made him happy. She made room for me without trying to force herself into spaces I wasn't ready to give her. And somewhere along the way, she became one of the most wonderful women I have ever known.

Now we live five minutes from her. My children adore her. I get to watch my father be happy with her. I get to see my kids have the kind of relationship with a grandmother that feels safe and ordinary and loving. And I thank God for her constantly.

She taught me something incredibly important without ever sitting me down to teach it: Motherhood is not only biology.

Sometimes the woman who gives birth to you wounds you. Sometimes another woman meets you when you're already grown and helps show you what safe love looks like. Sometimes you find pieces of mothering in friends' moms, stepmothers, older women, friends, teachers, and people who simply notice that you need something and offer it without demanding ownership of you in return.

And sometimes you have to learn to mother yourself.

I think becoming a mother forced me to confront all of this in ways nothing else could. There are things I do with my children that feel completely ordinary until some little part of me realizes I am giving them something I didn't have.

I apologize to my kids. Not perfectly. Not always as quickly as I should. But I apologize. I tell them when I was wrong. I don't want them to believe love requires perfection. I don't want them to become quiet because my emotions are too dangerous for them to disturb. I don't want my daughter believing her body determines her worth. I don't want either of my children afraid to call me when they have fucked up.

Especially then. God, especially then.

I want them to know that there is nothing they could tell me that would make me stop being the place they can come home to.

That doesn't mean I am a perfect mother. Holy shit, no. Ask my children. Actually don't. I don't need Yelp reviews from the tiny people who think asking them to put away a cup constitutes oppression.

I yell sometimes. I get overwhelmed. I have bad days. I say things wrong. I have had to learn parenting while simultaneously unlearning pieces of how I was parented. There are moments when something comes out of my mouth and I hear an echo I hate. Those moments scare me.

Then I have to remind myself that breaking a cycle does not mean never making a mistake. It means recognizing the mistake, taking responsibility for it, repairing what I can, and choosing differently the next time.

My children do not need a perfect mother. They need a safe one.

Maybe that is also why I have such a complicated reaction when people romanticize motherhood as though giving birth automatically makes a woman selfless, nurturing, safe, and deserving of unlimited access to her children forever.

It doesn't.

Mothers are human beings. Some are wonderful. Some are complicated but trying. Some fuck up badly and take responsibility and repair it. Some cause enormous harm and refuse to acknowledge it.

A title does not erase behavior. Blood does not make abuse harmless. And being someone's daughter does not require sacrificing your safety, marriage, children, mental well-being, or entire adult life at the altar of keeping your mother happy.

I wish someone had told younger me that. I wish someone had told her she was allowed to leave before things became dangerous enough that strangers in a hospital had to ask whether she was safe. I wish she had known that setting a boundary wasn't cruelty. I wish she had known that protecting her baby didn't make her an ungrateful daughter. I wish she had known that sometimes choosing your own family is exactly what being a good mother requires.

But she learned. Eventually. And now, almost eleven years later, I have a life I once couldn't imagine.

It isn't perfect. Nothing is. But it is mine.

My home is safe. My children know they are loved. My husband is still here, despite being given multiple opportunities to flee the circus, which is frankly his own poor decision-making at this point.

My dad is happy. My stepmom is five minutes away.

There is laughter in my house. There is food in the kitchen. There are books with my name on them. There is peace.

And there are still days when I grieve.

That's the part I think people misunderstand most about estrangement. You can know with absolute certainty that no contact is the right decision and still wish none of it had ever been necessary.

I don't want her back. I want the mother I should have been able to have. There is a difference. I can miss something that never really existed. I can grieve a living woman while protecting myself from her. I can work toward forgiveness without reconciliation. I can thank God for the women He placed in the empty spaces without pretending those spaces were never empty. And I can be somebody's mother without having had the example I deserved.

Maybe that's the part I am finally learning in my thirties.

I wasn't given everything I needed to become the woman I am. I learned anyway.

Sometimes from other women. Sometimes from friends. Sometimes from my stepmother. Sometimes from my own mistakes. Sometimes from the little girl I used to be, because remembering what she needed has taught me an awful lot about what I want my children to have.

I still can't French braid worth a shit. But my daughter will always know she can call me. I'll take that trade.

xoxo,
Lila